Backwater · Chapter 3 (3/3)

Miss Perne spoke in a clear, high, narrative tone that seemed each moment on the point of delighted laughter, her delicate head held high, her finely wrinkled face puckering with restrained pleasure. Miriam saw vividly the picture in the park, the dreadful, mean, grubby lake, the sad asphalt pathway all round it, the shabby London greenery, the October wind rushing through it, Miss Perne’s high stylish arrowy figure fluttered by the wind, swaying in her response to Mrs. Brinkwell’s story, the dreadful asphalt playground away to the left, its gaunt swings and bars⁠—gallows.⁠ ⁠… Ingoldsby⁠—the girls rushing across it, and held herself sternly back from a vision of Miss Perne chasing the delinquents down the wind. Why did Miss Perne speak so triumphantly? As much as to say There, my dear Jenny, there’s a problem you can’t answer. She enjoyed telling the tale and was not really upset about the girls. She spoke exactly as if she were reading aloud from Robinson Crusoe. Miss Haddie was watching again, flashing her eyes about as she gently spooned up her bread and milk. Miriam wished she knew whether Miss Haddie knew how difficult it was to listen gravely. She was evidently angry and disgusted. But still she could watch.

“Did ye go that way at all afterwards⁠—the way the girls went?”

“I did not,” beamed Miss Perne, turning to Miss Jenny as if waiting for a judgment.

“Well, eh, I’m sure, really, it’s most diffikilt. What is one to do with these gels? Now, Miriam, here’s something for you to exercise your wits upon. What would ye do, eh?”

Miriam hesitated. Memories kept her dumb. Of course she had never rushed about in a common park where rough boys came. At the same time⁠—if the girls wanted to rush about and scream and wear no hats nobody had any right to interfere with them⁠ ⁠… they ought to be suppressed though, North London girls, capable of anything in the way of horridness⁠ ⁠… the Pernes did not seem to see how horrid the girls were in themselves, common and knowing and horrid. “Dear, funny little O.M.’s”⁠ ⁠… they were something much more than that. They were wrong about the hats, but it was good, heavenly to be here like this with them. She turned to Miss Jenny, her mind in a warm confusion, and smiled into the little red face peering delicately from out its disorderly Gorgon loops.

“Well?”

“My dear Jenny,” said Miss Haddie’s soft hollow voice, “how should the child judge?”

Miriam’s heart leapt. She smiled inanely and eagerly accepted a second helping of blancmange suddenly proffered by Miss Perne, who was drawing little panting breaths and blinking sharply at her.

“Nonsense, Haddie. Come along, my dear, it’s a chance for you. Come along.”

“Tomboys,” said Miss Haddie indignantly.

Miriam drew a breath. It was wrong, they were not tomboys⁠—she knew they had not run like tomboys⁠—they had scuttled, she was sure⁠—horrid girls, that was what they were, nothing the Pernes could understand. The Pernes ought not to be bothered with them.

“Well,” she said, feeling a sudden security, “are we responsible for them out of school hours?”

Miss Haddie’s eyebrows moved nervously, and Miss Perne’s smile turned to a dubious mouthing.

“Eh, there you are. D’ye see, Deborah. That’s it. That’s the crucial point. Are we responsible? I’m sure I can’t say. That places the whole difficulty in a nutshell. Here are these gels, not even day boarders. How far can we control their general behaviour? Eh? I’m sure I don’t know.”

“My dear Jenny,” said Miss Haddie quickly, her hollow voice reverberating as if she were using a gargle, “it’s quite obvious that we can’t have gels known to belong to the school running about in the park with nothing on.”

“I agree, my dear Haddie. But, as Jenny says, how are we to prevent such conduct?”

“Don’t let us lose sight of Miriam’s point. Are we responsible for their play-times? I suppose we’re not, you know, Deborah, really after all. Not directly, perhaps. But sheerly we are indirectly responsible. Sheerly. We ought to be able to make it impossible for them to carry on in this unseemly fashion.”

“Yes, yes,” said Miss Deborah eagerly, “sheerly.”

“Is it education?” suggested Miriam.

“That’s it, my dear. It is education. That’s what’s wanted. That’s what these gels want. I don’t know, though. All this talk of education. It ought to be the thing. And yet look at these two gels. Both of them from Miss Cass’s. There’s her school now. Famous all over London. Three hundred gels. We’ve had several here. And they’ve all had that objectionable noisy tone. Eh, Deborah? I don’t know. How is it to be accounted for? Eh?”

“I’ve never heard of Miss Cass’s,” said Miriam.

“My dear child! It’s not possible! D’ye mean to say ye don’t know Miss Cass’s high school?”

“Oh, if it’s a high school, of course.”

All three ladies waited, with their eyes on her, making a chorus of inarticulate sounds.

“Oh well, high schools are simply fearful.”

Miriam glowed in a tide of gentle cackling laughter.

“Well, you know, I think there’s something in it,” giggled Miss Jenny softly. “It’s the number perhaps. That’s what I always say, Deborah. Treating the gels like soldiers. Like a regiment. D’ye see? No individual study of the gels’ characters⁠—”

“Well. However that may be, I am sure of one thing. I am sure that on Monday Polly and Eunice must be reprimanded. Severely reprimanded.”

“Yes. I suppose they must. They’re nice gels at heart, you know. Both of them. That’s the worst of it. Well, I hardly mean that. Only so often the naughty gels are so thoroughly⁠—well⁠—nice, likable at bottom, ye know, eh? I’m sure. I don’t know.”

Miriam sat on in the schoolroom after supper with the newspaper spread out on the brown American cloth table cover under the gas. She found a long column headed “The Royal Commission on Education.” The Queen, then, was interesting herself in education. But in England the sovereign had no power, was only a figurehead. Perhaps the Queen had been advised to interest herself in education by the Privy Council and the Conservatives, people of leisure and cultivation. A commission was a sort of command⁠—it must be important, something the Privy Council had decided and sent out in the Queen’s name.

She read her column, sitting comfortlessly between the window and the open door. As she read the room grew still. The memory of the talking and clinking supper-table faded, and presently even the ticking of the clock was no longer there. She raised her head at last. No wonder people read newspapers. You could read about what was going on in the country, actually what the Government was doing at that very moment. Of course; men seemed to know such a lot because they read the newspapers and talked about what was in them. But anybody could know as much as the men sitting in the armchairs if they chose; read all about everything, written down for everybody to see. That was the freedom of the Press⁠—Areopagitica, that the history books said so much about and was one of those new important things, more important than facts and dates. Like the Independence of Ireland. Yet very few people really talked like newspapers. Only angry men with loud voices. Here was the free Press that Milton had gone to prison for. Certainly it made a great difference. The room was quite changed. There was hardly any pain in the silent cane-seated chairs. There were really people making the world better. Now. At last. Perhaps it was rather a happy fate to be a teacher in the Banbury Park school and read newspapers. There were plenty of people who could neither read nor write. Someone had a servant like that who did all the marketing and never forgot anything or made any mistake over the change⁠—none the worse for it, pater said, people who wanted book-learning could get it, there must always be hewers of wood and drawers of water, laissez-faire. But Gladstone did not believe that. At this moment Gladstone was saying that because the people of England as a whole were uneducated their “condition of ignorance” affected the whole of the “body politic.” That was Gladstone. He had found that out⁠ ⁠… with large moist silky eyes like a dog and pointed collars seeing things as they were and going to change them.⁠ ⁠… Miriam stirred uneasily as she felt the beating of her heart.⁠ ⁠… If only she were at home how she could rush up and down the house and shout about it and shake Mary by the shoulders. She shrank into herself and sat stiffly up, suddenly discovering she was lounging over the table. As she moved she reflected that probably Gladstone’s being so very dark made him determined that things should not go on as they were. In that case Gladstonians would be dark⁠—perhaps not musical. Someone had said musical people were a queer soft lot. Laissez-faire. Lazy fair. But perhaps it was possible to be fair and musical and to be a Gladstonian too. You can’t have your cake and eat it. No. It was a good thing, one’s best self knew it was a good thing that someone had found out why people were so awful; like a dentist finding out a bad tooth however much it hurt. Only if education was going to be the principal thing and all teachers were to be “qualified” it was no use going on. Miss Jenny had said private schools were doomed.

For a long time she sat blankly contemplating the new world that was coming. Everyone would be trained and efficient but herself. She was not strong enough to earn a living and qualify as a teacher at the same time. The day’s work tired her to death. She must hide somewhere.⁠ ⁠… She would not be wanted.⁠ ⁠… If you were not wanted.⁠ ⁠… If you knew you were not wanted⁠—you ought to get out of the way. Chloroform. Someone had drunk a bottle of carbolic acid. The clock struck ten. Gathering up the newspaper she folded it neatly, put it on the hall table and went slowly upstairs, watching the faint reflection of the half-lowered hall gas upon the polished balustrade. The staircase was cold and airy. Cold rooms and landings stretched up away above her into the darkness. She became aware of a curious buoyancy rising within her. It was so strange that she stood still for a moment on the stair. For a second, life seemed to cease in her and the staircase to be swept from under her feet.⁠ ⁠… “I’m alive.”⁠ ⁠… It was as if something had struck her, struck right through her impalpable body, sweeping it away, leaving her there shouting silently without it. I’m alive.⁠ ⁠… I’m alive. Then with a thump her heart went on again and her feet carried her body warm and happy and elastic easily on up the solid stairs. She tried once or twice deliberately to bring back the breathless moment standing still on a stair. Each time something of it returned. “It’s me, me; this is me being alive,” she murmured with a feeling under her like the sudden drop of a lift. But her thoughts distracted her. They were eagerly talking to her declaring that she had had this feeling before. She opened her bedroom door very quietly. The air of the room told her that Nancie and Beadie were asleep. Going lightly across to the chest of drawers dressing-table by the window as if she were treading on air, she stood holding its edge in the darkness. Two forgotten incidents flowed past her in quick succession; one of waking up on her seventh birthday in the seaside villa alone in a small dark room and suddenly saying to herself that one day her father and mother would die and she would still be there, and after a curious moment when the darkness seemed to move against her, feeling very old and crying bitterly, and another of standing in the bow of the dining-room window at Barnes looking at the raindrops falling from the leaves through the sunshine and saying to Eve, who came into the room as she watched, “D’you know, Eve, I feel as if I’d suddenly wakened up out of a dream.” The bedroom was no longer dark. She could see the outlines of everything in the light coming from the streetlamps through the half-closed Venetian blinds. Beadie sighed and stirred. Miriam began impatiently preparing for bed without lighting the gas. “What’s the use of feeling like that if it doesn’t stay? It doesn’t change anything. Next time I’ll make it stay. It might whisk me right away. There’s something in me that can’t be touched or altered. Me. If it comes again. If it’s stronger every time.⁠ ⁠… Perhaps it goes on getting stronger till you die.”