Chapter II

Daphne was growing tall. If by mistake she ran into a room of visitors and rushed out again with an "Oh, sorry!" the impression she left was of thin legs seen above the knee, and untidy brown hair. Also of a hot blush, less of shyness than of sudden guilt and consequent laughter. And somebody was sure to say, "She's going to be a tomboy and no mistake." Her high spirits were so high that often when she was alone she felt she could scream with them. This over-plus of vitality, her father used to say hopefully, would run to creative work or a passionate love one day.

Disliking most things that Miss Durgon recommended, Daphne had not decided what sort of character she would like to have. She was a malleable mass. But one ambition was warming. The frequent repetition of the phrase "tomboyish" had pleased her, and she decided to live up to it. She decided to hate dolls, doll's houses and sewing. And she was secretly pleased when people said, "The girl ought to have been the boy, and the boy ought to have been the girl," for she did not doubt that she could dominate Owen any day of the week. This desire to be masculine, introduced from without, was perhaps the earliest principle to strike a root in her.

She imagined that her hatred of repression--or, in other words, her hatred of Miss Durgon--was the natural outcome of her manliness. The obvious fact that Owen was timid of their guardian while _she_ could be outspokenly rebellious, and, please God, intended to be more so, gave her a deal of satisfaction.

Once, sitting in the little room below stairs, and talking to Hollins, who was working a sewing-machine, she asked her for an opinion on Miss Durgon.

"Is she a good woman, Hollins?"

Hollins appeared to lift her lips towards her nose.

"Well, that's not for me to say. What some of us think we keep to ourselves."

"I say, Hollins, shall I tell you what I think, if you tell me what you think."

"No; I shan't tell you what I think if you tell me what you think."

"Oh, Hollins!"

Hollins turned the wheel monotonously, her head slightly on one side.

"There are some things one thinks that are best thought and left at that."

"But why?"

"Why? Because they ain't pretty, silly one. Now do you know?"

"You mean, you think Miss Durgon a beast?"

"Miss Daphne, I never said nothing of the sort. And I'll thank you not to go putting it about that I did."

Daphne started to be ingratiating.

"No, but you meant it, didn't you, Hollins?"

"I never, so there! All I mean is, some people are made in their own way and can't help it."

"Made what way, Hollins?"

Hollins snapped an entangled thread.

"Made so as they know how to worm themselves into positions, and sort of make themselves indispensable, and get the power into their hands. Oh, it's clever; I'd be the last to say it wasn't."

"She doesn't like you, Hollins."

"She doesn't, doesn't she? Milady doesn't. Well, I wonder now if that'll spoil my appetite. I wonder if I shall lay awake fretting about that.... And how, Miss Mischief, may you happen to know whether she likes me or not?"

"Because she often says I oughtn't to hang about you so much."

"She does? Says you shouldn't ought to hang about me so much? Oh! There's where you are. I hold me tongue from speaking against her, but she'll say what she likes about me readily enough. There's the lady. And mind you, I've kep' quiet about more things than one I've noticed.

"I've noticed, f'r instance--however.... Common people like Hollins, you see, haven't got eyes, and what they think don't matter, as they've no brains worth speaking of...."

The forces moving towards a more overt war between Daphne and Miss Durgon were not only working in Daphne. Miss Durgon, who had now been many years with Mr. Bruno, was no longer nervous of jeopardising her position by a false move. She had summed up her employer, and knew that his love of ease and unworried seclusion would resist any idea of change. She was still under forty-five, and very different, of course, from what she appeared to the eyes of her wards. Naught of her slimness or good carriage had left her, and now that she was earning a fair stipend and could supplement it from the housekeeping money, she dressed remarkably well. To people of her own generation and class she showed a vivacity and cleverness such as never appeared before those creatures who could not interest her--children and servants. Of late Miss Durgon had enjoyed the admiration of some men, though in each case, unfortunately, they were the husbands of her friends.

This admiration had increased her self-respect, and, as a result, her indignation at the rebelliousness of Daphne. The indignation demanded an early overthrow of the child. And by the side of this sense that Daphne must be taught her place sat an unhealthy but growing desire. Though she knew nothing about suppressed sex, she saw that there was perversion somewhere in an idea that could so stimulate her. She wanted to whip Daphne at least once. There was a sensuous quality about the child that would make the whipping of her pleasant.

The collision came when Miss Durgon tried to stop Daphne's game of "Getting up early."

The children had discovered this game in the months before their father left for India. Those were summer days, and Daphne would wake up Owen as soon as she herself was awakened by the sunlight streaming behind the blinds and the chatter of the birds in Queen's Club Gardens. They would dress with all the interest of getting up before any one else was astir, and then creep down the stairs, a little nervous of the deserted, blind-dimmed house. Unchaining and unbolting the hall door, they ran out into the sunny publicity of Deseret Road. In their hands they carried a toy cricket bat (one solid piece of yellow wood without a splice), four stumps and a tennis ball. Their destination was a sunken waste ground at the corner of Goscombe Road, which, though hillocky, weed-grown, and not empty of refuse, required no great imagination to be converted into Queen's Club Gardens. There they would set their stumps and imitate the white-flannelled cricketers whom they had watched from their back windows. Daphne represented Cambridge and Owen Oxford.

The clearest line of division in the human race was that which divided the people who were Oxford from those who were Cambridge. Owen was Oxford, because Oxford always won the Boat-race; Daphne was Cambridge because Cambridge never did. There were other reasons for their choice: Owen was Oxford because his father was, and his name began with an O; Daphne was Cambridge because light blue was a nicer colour than dark blue, and D, her initial, was nearer C than O, and because hardly any one else she knew was Cambridge, and because Owen was Oxford.

Cambridge batted first, and Owen, for Oxford, opened the bowling. If Owen's ball came near enough, she tried to hit it; and when she missed it, ran after it, picked it up and returned it to him.

"Bowl us something one can hit," she shouted.

Sometimes, after she had hit it, Owen stopped it and gathered it up; and then she would instruct him to hold it while she ran to his stump and back.

"That's what I have to do," she explained.

So Owen examined the stitches of the tennis ball while Daphne ran to where he was standing and back to her wicket.

"Now you bowl again."

"But when can I bat?"

"When you've knocked over these three stumps, silly. Don't you know the game?"

Owen looked a little sulky.

"I can't hit them with you in front."

"Well, when I've made thirty I'll retire."

When Daphne bowled she would only consent to bowl over-arm. That was the way they did it at Queen's Club. Sometimes the milkman would stay his clattering cart to watch her, and call out: "Good old W. G.! What price Lord 'Awke?" His "That's right! Sling 'em up, miss!" always deepened the colour of her cheeks, already warmed with running; and she would try to impress him by sending down an especially good ball. If it proved, however, to be rather wide she would call out to Owen loud explanations of so unusual a failure, hoping to keep her reputation with the milkman. When the game was over she hurried back to tell her father the result of the match, the number of runs she had scored, and how she had been obliged to retire in order that Owen might have an innings.

But now that Mr. Bruno was abroad Miss Durgon withdrew her consent from the game. At breakfast one morning, when she heard that they had been out, she pronounced, as all rose from the table:

"You're not to do that any more. Do you clearly understand?"

"Why?" asked Daphne, with symptoms of sulkiness.

"Why? Because I say so. You must allow me to know better than you. Ladies' children don't play in the streets."

(In the vocabulary of Miss Durgon there were two kinds of children--"ladies' children" and "district children," the latter being sometimes called "poor people's children.")

"Father used to let us," grumbled Daphne.

"Don't answer back. Your father has entrusted your bringing up to me, and doesn't want to be bothered about it. You're older now, too. Besides, cricket isn't a nice game for a little girl."

"Why?"

"Never mind why. You'll understand these things later on. It's indelicate."

Daphne was a little nervous of her next remark, but as she was more frightened of convicting herself of fear, she hurriedly forced it out.

"I shall ask father when he comes back."

"You excessively rude little girl!" exclaimed Miss Durgon. "You want a good whipping. I've a good mind to give you one. You've been getting quite out of hand lately."

That Miss Durgon was empowered to give her a whipping had not entered Daphne's mind. Hitherto, when it had been a case for such extreme measures, Miss Durgon had spoken to her father. But that was when she had been very young. These words of her guardian momentarily repulsed her. But feeling the ignominy of surrender, and observing that Owen was staring open-mouthed from one to the other as they exchanged these interesting remarks, she persisted. One had to play up before him.

"In the Bible they played in the streets. Father Alderwood said so. They played at funerals in the market-place, and Jesus Christ played with them----"

"Daphne! I never heard such talk. Go out of the room at once. How dare you talk blasphemously like that? Upon my soul--mark my words--if you try on this arguing with me I shall one day take a stick to you. I mean it. Mixing up religion and play like that! Little humbug!"

"I'm not a humbug," said Daphne, walking round the breakfast table to keep it between Miss Durgon and herself.

"You're a little humbug," repeated Miss Durgon, who had so lost her temper as hardly to know what she was talking about. "Parading religion, and at the same time being insolent and disobedient. You're a regular little Pharisee."

To be called what you have called others is always as wounding as it is astonishing.

"I'm not a Pharisee." The tears sprang to Daphne's eyes.

"Yes, you are; and will you keep quiet, I tell you?"

"Well, if I'm a Pharisee, you're a Sadducee."

"Upon my soul! Come here! Don't run away! It's no good; I shall catch you sooner or later." Miss Durgon had paused, feeling the indignity of running after a child. "Insulting a woman who's giving up her life to you like that! Sadducee indeed! You don't know what a Sadducee is."

"Yes, I do. It's some one who doesn't believe in the Resurrection."

"Daphne, come here. I'm going to give you a thorough good whipping. You've earned it richly."

Daphne ran towards the door. Miss Durgon arrived there at the same time. Daphne slipped past her, and, crying loudly, ran out of the room. She heard Miss Durgon call, "Stop that child!" so raced upstairs, and remembering the bolt on the bathroom door, rushed in, slammed the door, and shot home the bolt.

Breathless, she threw herself on the linoleum floor, and sobbed with heaving shoulders. Knocks came to the door, and the voice of Miss Durgon.

"Open at once, Daphne. Bad, naughty little girl! Open the door at once."

"I shan't! I shan't!" sobbed Daphne.

The door shook. Daphne had a wild idea, should the door yield, of leaping out of the window and crashing to her death in the street. She jumped up at a moment when the door seemed likely to give, and flung up the sash.

"What are you doing?" cried the alarmed Miss Durgon, and the door ceased to shake. "Daphne, what are you doing?"

Daphne roared through her tears.

"If you come in, I'm going out of the window. Out of the window."

"You're a bad, evil little girl. I'm sure I don't know what to do with you."

Miss Durgon retired; and Daphne and she were separated by the bathroom door, both a little alarmed at the storm, and rather vague as to how it had arisen.

More than once this bathroom had been the scene of a solitary performance at which Daphne would have been ashamed to be caught, though it gave her a sweet, troubled delight such as no other game could give. It had sprung from the everlasting lilt in her mind of some lines of poetry, found in her history after the story of King Charles's beheading:

He nothing common did nor mean
Upon that memorable scene ...

Nor called the gods, with vulgar spite,
To vindicate his helpless right;
But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.

The nature of her delight in them she did not analyse; but a kindred delight--an emotion not empty of troubling--had used to come to her, in the old home, when she saw a shaft of yellow lamplight thrown on to evening grass; or a wood of dark firs spining a hill in the landscape's blue distance; or those stretches of rusty bracken, with here and there a lonely, blown tree, that were Shadwell Common in autumn; or red firelight on old wood, when sunset had fallen before tea, and the lamps were not yet lit. It was the same haunting something that came out of Hans Andersen: "She flew away as if she were flying straight into the sun." And the old nursery rhyme had it:

How many miles to Babylon?
Three score and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
Aye, there and back again.

"He nothing common did nor mean." A scene in which she died like that, wrongfully condemned but too proud to protest her innocence, was Daphne's shameful game in the bathroom behind a bolted door. At first she used to place the chair for a block, and walk towards it through a street of staring faces. Before its feet she knelt down, so that her hair fell away from the neck. There, without visible tremor, she awaited the blow.

But gradually the drama in this form failed to express fully the movements within her. She wanted the cruelly executed person to be herself, Daphne Bruno, not a character in history. And in these days people were never beheaded. If the game was to satisfy her, it must be brought into the realism of the present. And so it changed into a trial for murder, where Daphne stood in the dock (her hands on the woodwork round the bath) and listened in silence to the perjury of witnesses, or turned grave, brave eyes on the judge as he pronounced the sentence. After hearing his words, while the tense solemnity remained in the court, she made a brief speech, proclaiming her faith that her character would one day be cleared, and thanking those friends in the gallery who had never doubted her innocence, and the Q.C. who had defended her as ably as it was in the power of man to do.

Then, having done nothing common, mean or vulgar, she turned and followed the warder to the condemned cell.

But to-day, in stormy mood, she could play no such game. Picking herself up from the floor, she sat sideways on the chair with her arm along its back. Her sobs were now internal and intermittent. The chair as a permanent seat proved uncomfortably hard, so she sat on the cork mat on the linoleum and picked off chips from its broken corner. When this palled, she stood up and traced her finger along the squares in the tiled wallpaper, reaching at last the hole in the plaster made by the door-key. Here she played "snowstorms," putting a finger in the hole and, by scratching it downwards, sending a tenuous shower of powdered plaster to the floor. But this palled too.

Very quiet was the house, as if her disgrace were like an illness, compelling all the inmates to go about their business with subdued steps. She looked out of the window, and watched the passing of carts and pedestrians. Sometimes she saw children known to her, and drew away her head lest they guessed anything.

If only she had a book to read! If only she could make a silent dash up the next flight of stairs to the nursery, and seize a book, and rush back to her fastness! Guiltily she pulled the bolt, opened the door, and listened. Not a sound anywhere. She tiptoed through an ante-room on to the landing, and then leapt like a chamois from stair to stair. Her heart beat fast as she searched quickly along the shelf that contained her few books. There was hardly anything she had not read several times, except, indeed, "Little Women," that Aunt Belle had given her for her birthday, and she had refused to read on account of its feminine title. On the ground floor a door shut. Instantly she seized the book, and hurtled downstairs to her bathroom. She rested her book on the woodwork round the bath, whose varnish had been so spoiled by soap; and with her head on her left palm and her right hand playing with the tap-handles, she began to read. In a few minutes the tap-handles were neglected; she was in America with Jo and Meg and Beth and Amy. Her disgrace withdrew from memory, save in moments when she contrasted Miss Durgon with the lovable Marmee, or saw a likeness between her and the peppery Aunt March. The high sentiments emitted by Jo and Meg and Beth and Amy made her feel rather good herself.

Wearying of the hard seat, she placed the open book upon the floor, and herself on her stomach before it, with her hands supporting her chin, her legs opened, and one foot occasionally rising into the air. By now the Marches were the most fascinating family in the world.

The book must surely be literature of a high order, with all those noble resolutions and elegant little sermons by Marmee. There stirred in Daphne, for the first time, the ambition to write. She stopped reading for a minute, and stared over the book's edge. As pain in the adult artist liberates itself in created work, so Daphne's present misery sought liberation in a dream of great books. Books of this kind, very sad and uplifting and beautiful. The Marches stood cataleptically fixed in the positions in which she had left them, while her thoughts swept forward over a life of successes, and down many side avenues, and beyond death into the long centuries of fame. Yes, she had made a decision; she would be an authoress. It was thrilling. She released the Marches from their trance, and followed their rapid movements again. But the dream had to be returned to.... Only after many such breaks did the book win her back to oblivious concentration.

Then, in the enthralling company of Jo and Meg and Beth and Amy, she guessed nothing of the passage of time, till the house filled with a smell of greens and roasting fat; and dinner-things began to clatter in the dining-room. Mingled with her reading was a wonder if anything would be done about her dinner. She was quite determined she was not going to unlock the door and go downstairs. The dinner-bell rang--louder than usual, as though addressed to her--but she did not move. Only now she could no longer read; she could only listen. Evidently, by the silence, they had sat down to the meal, leaving her to come or stay away as she cared. Further clattering of plates; that was the meat-course being taken downstairs--and she was too late now for any. Here was the pudding coming up the stairs and being taken in. And now, to judge by the silence, they were eating it.... Ah, footsteps were coming up to her landing, rather slowly, as of a person who found it none too easy to manage all the stairs of these London houses.

A heavy breath heaved on the landing. Hollins, undoubtedly.

"If I had a sovereign every time I climbed these stairs, I should be a wealthy woman. Dearie ... dearie, are you there?" Daphne answered with a shapeless sound. "Why not come down and have something to eat? I've come myself to ask you. She's given orders that nothing's to be kep' hot for you. Come down, there's a good girl. You can't go starving yourself, you know. Even I should call that naughty of you. Come on, dear, you must eat something. There's no smell in nothing, as the saying is."

"Am I going to be whipped?"

"Well, she says so. She says you're making your punishment worse by this persisting. But I dare say she's only trying it on. She's punishing you in another way, and I do call it nasty." The door was open twelve inches by this time. "She's purposely taking Master Owen to the Zoo this afternoon. Heaven knows I'm the last person to encourage children to be saucy, but if I'd been him, I'd uv refused to go...."

Daphne shut the door, but gently, in Hollins's face and slid the bolt home; silently, so that Hollins should not be offended. Hollins's voice pursued through the wood: "Never mind, darling. Never mind. When they've gone you and I'll go for a nice walk together. And now come and eat something. Spite of what she says, I've kep' a plateful in the oven."

Daphne's reply was moaned:

"I'm not coming down to be whipped."

"No, and I'm not sure that I blame you, neither.... Well, don't cry, silly one. Let's hope they'll start soon, and then you can come out."

When she was gone, Daphne went to the window, out of which she stared dreamily at the stretch of Deseret Road. Already she had heard the rush of Owen's feet up the stairs, and the preparations of Miss Durgon in her room; and it was not long before the descending steps were heard, and the movements in the hall, and the shutting of the front door. In a second they would be in view. There they were, Miss Durgon walking quickly, and Owen running at her side. Once Owen turned round and, after looking up at the bathroom window, said something to Miss Durgon, but she walked on without impairing her dignity by a look behind. Daphne slipped out of sight--she had not wanted Owen to see her.

Now she opened the door and carried her swollen eyes and red nose down into the dining-room. There was no one there. Too ashamed to show herself to the servants in the basement, she moved heavily about, hoping her feet would be heard by Hollins. A sham fit of coughing was also tried. Then she heard the jingling of a tray, and Hollins coming up the steep stairs.

"There!" said Hollins, as she placed the tray on the table, "I expect you'll enjoy it all the more for being hungry."

Seeing Daphne's eyes, she gathered her against her breast, muttering only, "What a shame! What a shame!"

The walk in the afternoon was clouded for Daphne by her memory of the morning's emotion and by the shadow of the evening when Miss Durgon would return. She was subdued as they passed along the shop-windows. One bright interlude came when Hollins stopped in front of a sweet-shop and told her to choose a penn'orth to her fancy. Every jar or dish in the window she examined. "Hundreds of Thousands" were four ounces a penny, but they went so quickly. "Pontefract Cakes" didn't last, either. "Liquorice, Linseed and Chlorodyne Lozenges" were always good, because little bits could be broken off and dissolved slowly in the mouth, flavouring it for hours; but grown-up people forbade these as drugs. A glass jar of gelatine discs at two ounces a penny decided her. These discs, sometimes used for mending broken panes, stayed in the mouth for a wonderful time, and could even be taken out and kept in a handkerchief. It would be lovely to lie on the ground sucking them while she pursued the adventures of Jo and Meg and Beth and Amy. For already the book, whose atmosphere had never quite dissolved, was calling for her return. She persuaded Hollins to take her once past the fire-station on the chance that their arrival might synchronise with a call for the engines. Never yet had she seen the great doors swung open, the horses harnessed like lightning, and the smoking, spark-dropping engines galloped past a gathered crowd. But her despairing conviction that there would be no movement in the station proved correct. Only a faint thrill could be got from the rows of shining helmets on both walls, and the shining brass of the engines.

The walk home was depressing since it led to the moment of Miss Durgon's return; and when they were in the hall Daphne suggested that, now she had had her walk, she should go back to the bathroom and bolt the door.

"No, you're not going to," said Hollins. "She shan't whip you now. If she says she will, I shall take the liberty of telling her that she's punished you once by not taking you to the Zoo.... You read your book and we'll see."

So after tea, Daphne read on, sucking the gelatine discs. But the reading was all spoiled by her underthinking, which kept reminding her that Miss Durgon was due. On the sounds of people coming up the front-door steps, her heart leapt in fright. The latch-key turned, the door opened, and an umbrella was put into the hat-stand. Here was Hollins toiling up the basement stairs to her defence. Her voice mingled in the passage with Miss Durgon's. Then she entered.

"She says you're to go to bed. She says she's no wish to see you at all." (In truth, Daphne's stormy revolt had quite frightened away Miss Durgon's desire to whip her.) "She says----"

Just then Owen rushed in to tell his sister all about the Zoo, but he had scarcely uttered a word before Hollins interrupted:

"Well, I took you for a little gentleman, I did."

Owen looked at Hollins with the timid glance of the corrected.

"A little gentleman wouldn't mention anything about where he'd been, a little gentleman wouldn't."

Owen lapsed into a dubious silence, while Daphne declared:

"I didn't want to go to his dirty, beastly old Zoo"; and Hollins hastened to prevent trouble by saying:

"Now, Miss Daphne, that'll do. Suppose you zoo off to bed."