Chapter IV

Philip did not want to send Lily to school. He and his wife had been at one upon this point. He regretted even the three months that she had spent at the convent, although he remarked at intervals for long afterwards that a girls' school and a convent were not at all the same thing.

"Besides, my little pet, you were only there for a month or two, and you were not at all well when you came away. It wasn't at all a success."

"But that was years ago," Lily protested. "I should like it very much, now, or best of all if only you would send me to a proper school, Father."

For nearly four years, ever since her mother's death, she had asked at intervals to be sent to school.

At first, Philip had answered her with a sort of mournful playfulness.

"What! Doesn't my little girl get enough lessons at home? We must talk to Miss Cleeve, and see if she can't manage an extra hour or two on Saturday afternoons--shall we, Lily?"

The Lily of ten and eleven years old had dutifully pretended amusement, and thought herself naughty for the inward pang that she experienced at being treated like a baby.

A year later, she was far more openly rebellious.

"It's so very dull doing lessons all alone, Father."

"If God had spared us our poor little Yvonne, you would not have to do them alone," said Philip, the allusion, in some mysterious way, having exactly the effect of a merited rebuke.

Lily immediately, and quite irrationally, felt that she had been heartless.

"Besides," continued her father, pressing the advantage that he perceived himself to have gained, although without quite knowing how, "you don't want to break up our poor little home-party any further, my child, do you? You and I and poor little Kenneth are all that are left now, you know."

Lily was silenced, although, dimly, she knew that she had been unfairly defeated. What he said was true--she cried herself to sleep at the thought of it sometimes--but her powers of clear thinking had been too thoroughly obscured for her to analyze the illogical attitude taken up by her father, who from time to time said, with the most obvious sincerity:

"Poor little children! How can I do anything for them? _She_ made home, and now that she and little Yvonne are gone, there is nothing left but sadness and emptiness. I have no wish whatever to live, but it must be as God Almighty wills."

"It couldn't make any difference to him if I went to school," Lily reflected resentfully, after Philip had thus once more put in words the utter despondency that hung always over him.

By the time that Lily was fourteen, there was scarcely anything left of the pride and the species of doting affection that her father had displayed during her early childhood. His ideal of a happy home had been rudely shattered by Eleanor's death, and he attributed the signs of Lily's inevitable development to a lack of veneration for her mother's memory. He was honestly incapable of perceiving that, if Eleanor had lived, conflict of the most irreconcilable kind must have arisen between her and Lily.

He dumbly and piteously resented Lily's incoherent attempts at self-expression, her struggling efforts to evolve her own personality in the midst of a stultifying atmosphere, with much the same blind sentimentality that he regretted the lost, blue-eyed prettiness of her baby days and the unescapable certainty that she was grown too tall to sit upon his knee.

Her continual requests to be sent to school distressed him profoundly. At one and the same time, he saw Lily convicted of disloyalty in wishing to alter the routine of life instituted for her by her mother, and as heartlessly desirous of abandoning her lonely father and little brother in their changed and saddened home.

At last he said to her:

"I can stand this no longer. Go, Lily, but remember that God Himself will condemn those who blaspheme against the sacred love of father and mother. You can go. I will keep no child at home against its will."

His face was drawn and grey with suffering, as he looked at the child who seemed to him to be growing up devoid of heart. Only the extremity of pain and disappointment would have made him speak so and Lily realized it.

She broke into terrified sobs, and saw herself with his eyes.

Both were shaken by the sense of an immense issue involved. The question had acquired a monstrous and devastating magnitude. Only the shamed and stifled, but still living, sense of proportion in Lily's soul, that warned her how bitterly she would, later, regret the folly of yielding to a sentimental impulse, prevented her from exclaiming that she never, never wanted to leave home as long as she lived.

An almost intolerable period of tension followed. The gloom of Philip Stellenthorpe became abysmal. Only little four-year-old Kenneth appeared to be cheerfully insensible to it.

Undaunted by his father's weighty tenderness, that was in itself an advertisement of melancholy, Kenneth continued to play with his toys, to shout for bread-and-jam with his tea, and to wriggle unconcernedly away when his father would have lifted him to Lily's old post of honour on the parental knee.

Kenneth was far from being the motherless baby boy of fiction. He evinced no special affection for anyone, and was quite unaffectedly impenitent when sins, that had once been the cause of heart-searching remorse to Lily and Yvonne, were pointed out to him with sorrowful gravity. Although only ten years separated them, Kenneth was in fact the modern child that Lily had never been allowed to become.

She watched him with more awe than affection, sometimes. He seemed to be a hard little boy.

The next phase of Lily Stellenthorpe's education was inaugurated by the astonishing announcement of Miss Cleeve, that she was going to be married and must go away.

"The old order changeth," said Philip, in tones of bewildered pain.

He gave Miss Cleeve a munificent wedding present, and reflected that yet another link with the past was breaking.

To look for another governess for Lily seemed to him an appalling task. His conscience would not have allowed him to depute it to his sister Clothilde, for ever since the fulfilment of her pronouncement that Vonnie would not live to grow up, Philip had steadily assured himself that poor Clo's judgments were not to be trusted.

Such is the curious effect produced by a prophet whose word has been too well verified in his own country.

Philip, like all sentimentalists, preferred asking advice to taking it. He decided to consult Eleanor's cousin and nearest surviving relative, unconsciously reserving to himself the right of finding that, after all, poor Charlie Hardinge was not a very sympathetic fellow, and held very little sacred, and that his counsels could not be worthy of serious consideration.

Besides the fact of his relationship--of potent weight with Philip--Charlie Hardinge was further qualified as adviser, in being the father of three little girls. The little girls, however, and Ethel their mother, had only been seen by the Stellenthorpes at rare intervals.

Charlie himself was in the habit of staying with them for two nights on his way to and from the north of England, in the course of every year. He always brought the children presents, and Philip always said in advance, nervously: "You must thank Cousin Charlie very nicely if he is kind enough to bring you a little present of chocolates, but you'll keep them downstairs in the drawing-room, like good children, won't you?"

He had never been able to forget altogether that Charlie Hardinge had once expressed injudicious surprise at the decorous restraint that prevailed over the distribution of sweets presented to the Stellenthorpe children.

Unconsciously, he liked Charlie much better _in esse_ than _in posse_, and found even his exuberant habit of repeating everything he said three or four times over merely an ebullition of warm-hearted earnestness.

"Now, now, now, now," said Charlie. "You want some suggestion about this kiddie of yours--your Lily. I understand perfectly. What are you to do with her--fourteen, isn't she? Fourteen--yes--fourteen. Now, our Dorothy isn't fourteen yet, and Janet and Sylvia, of course, are younger still. Sylvia is just ten, in fact. You know they've just gone to school at Bridgecrap?"

"No," said Philip, startled. "I had no idea of it. I always supposed that you and Ethel meant to educate them at home."

His terrible fear of any unpleasantness made him hesitate, and feel unable to say, as he had meant to say, that he disapproved of girls' schools altogether.

"Well, it was a sacrifice," Hardinge admitted with a sigh. "A sacrifice. But we felt that it was for the kiddies' own good. No brother, you see. They wanted to be taught how to take chaff, and ragging, and teasing--that's what they wanted--they wanted to get thoroughly well teased. Now your Lily, my dear fellow--very pretty kiddie-widdie, mind you, beautifully mannered, and I'm only saying this because I'm fond of her--your kiddie doesn't know how to take a joke. I noticed it this evening, when I was chaffing her a little about holding herself so badly. That's another thing she wants--drilling. Drilling, drilling!"

Charlie hit himself a resounding blow on the chest.

"She wants drilling!"

"She is tall for her age," said Philip, who considered personal remarks ill-bred, unless complimentary.

"So's my Dorothy," Hardinge inexorably returned. "Now, how tall is your kiddie? How tall exactly?"

"I really don't know, but she is certainly taller than most children of fourteen. In fact the governess, before she left, told me that Lily was outgrowing her strength."

"Our Dorothy is thirteen and a half and stands five-foot five in her stockings. Five-foot five, and a back like a ramrod. Now, Lily isn't five-foot five, I'm positive of that. We'll measure her to-morrow, and you'll find she's not five-foot five. Nowhere near it."

Philip made a politely acquiescent sound.

"Drilling is what she wants, drilling and games. It's done everything in the world for my kiddie-widdies. Little Sylvia, now, didn't hold herself as well as the other two--was rather inclined to poke. And after one term at Bridgecrap she's holding her head up, and her shoulders back, and talks of nothing but hockey."

Philip suppressed a shudder at a consummation which appeared to him so utterly undesirable.

"You must send Lily to Bridgecrap," said Charlie Hardinge positively. "No place like it. Splendid air--right up above the sea, outdoor games all the year round--swimming and gym--everything you can think of."

"Who is the lady in charge?"

"A splendid woman--splendid woman. Miss Melody--Monica Melody. You've heard of her, of course--took a university degree, and has written some very sound stuff about education. Mind you, I sounded her very carefully before I sent the kiddies. Ethel and I had really had no idea of sending them to school at all--but they were keen to go. It was their own idea--Dorothy started it."

Philip almost groaned.

"I can hardly understand the idea of young children who actually _want_ to leave home," he said, considerably understating his case.

"Your kiddie-widdie wants to go to school too, eh?" said Charlie acutely. "I thought so. I thought so now, I thought so. You take it all too seriously, my dear fellow, far too seriously. It's very natural, you know. My little girliekins had one another, after all, but Lily hasn't a soul--not a soul of her own age."

"This is a lonely place, as you know," said Philip stiffly. "There are no girls of her own age within a reasonable distance."

"Well, are there any boys then, any boys?"

"Boys?"

"Boys--boys of her own age. Boys, boys, boys. If there are no girls for the poor kiddie to play with, I suppose she must play with boys."

Philip rose from his chair and made elaborate examination of a slightly smoking lamp.

By the time that he had meticulously adjusted it, he was able to turn round and speak with calm.

"I shouldn't like my little Lily to become a tomboy. She is quite happy in her own little nursery."

"Now, what's the good of talking as though she were still a baby? She's not a baby--you really must make up your mind to it, my dear chap, that the kiddie isn't a baby any longer."

Philip was quite incapable of making up his mind to anything of the sort, but by sheer force of iteration Charlie Hardinge succeeded in accustoming his mind to the possibility of sending Lily to Bridgecrap.

To Lily's dismay, almost as much as to Philip's own, Charlie asked her in her father's presence:

"Wouldn't you like to go to school, little woman, where my kiddie-widdies are? You've often heard of my Dorothy, now, haven't you? and she's always asking about you. They're all three of them at school at Bridgecrap now, as happy as the day is long. You'd like to go to school, wouldn't you?"

Lily cast a hasty glance at her father. His eyes did not meet hers, but she knew the profoundly dejected droop of his head, and was acutely sensitive to the meaning of his silence.

The atmosphere in which she and her father lived--of perpetually wounded susceptibilities, of suppressed verities, of only half-sincere demonstrations, continued long after they had ceased to be spontaneous--had made of Lily a super-sensitive, unbalanced creature, distrustful of her own instincts, and almost incapable of clear thinking. She had become the victim of muddle, the commonest and the most disastrous foundation upon which to build up a life.

It now seemed to her that it would be impossible to speak the truth in the face of the obvious pain that it would give her father, while at the same time she was aware of the utter uselessness of telling a lie. To tell a lie, incidentally, was a sin, but then so was it a sin to be heartless and undutiful, and the latter was fraught with the more painful consequences of the two.

Good-natured Charlie Hardinge saw, without understanding it, the conflict reflected on her small, pale face.

"Come, come, come, come! You look as though school would do you all the good in the world. My kiddies have got cheeks like roses, and Dorothy holds herself like a grenadier--head up, shoulders back! They think Bridgecrap the jolliest place in the world."

"Is it a large school?" asked Lily, evading the point at issue with absolute relief.

"Thirty girls. Miss Melody has some very nice kiddies there indeed--girls you're likely to see something of, later on. Very nice girls--girls that Ethel and I thoroughly liked the look of. Walk well, hold themselves well, keen on all sorts of games----"

It might be said that Philip eventually sent Lily to Bridgecrap in spite of Charlie Hardinge's recommendations, rather than because of them.

The thing that really moved him most, although he was quite unaware that it was the determining factor in his decision, was Charlie's positive assurance that Lily was losing her prettiness.

"The kiddie's pale," said Charlie accusingly. "She used to have a pretty colour when she was a little thing, and now she looks anæmic--and there are lines under her eyes. She's moping, Philip, that's what it is. Moping. No wonder she holds herself so badly!"

Philip did not like hearing strictures, that he could not feel to be altogether without foundation, upon the appearance of his daughter.

It cost him real and severe pain to let her go, although her presence at home gave him no happiness, and he did not attempt to conceal the extent of his sacrifice from Lily.

"Good-bye, my poor little girl. You shall have your own way, and go right away from home for a time. I hope it may answer, my poor child, and send you back some day to those who love you best in the world. God bless you."

This was Philip's valediction, sending Lily to her new surroundings with a leaden weight of guilt at her heart, and a reproachful picture of a sorrowful and deserted father returning to an empty house.

Having more or less lost hold upon her own convictions, she felt that, had it been possible, she would gladly have renounced Bridgecrap for ever, and returned to her father.

In this frame of mind, and with spirit encompassed by the accumulation of false values that had steadily been put before her in one form or another by the two small worlds that she had known--her home and the convent--it may readily be assumed that Lily began her career at Bridgecrap school under a severe handicap.

The standards there were altogether different from any that she had known yet.

"Honour" seemed to be the watchword of the place. The girls who excelled in games, or in examinations, did so "for the honour of the school." Their own personal honour was appealed to, freely and frequently. The convent system of _surveillance_ would have been unthinkable, at Bridgecrap.

"I want you girls to have just the Public School code of honour that your brothers have----" Miss Melody herself often rousingly remarked.

But although the Bridgecrap girls were to play games like boys, to hold the traditional boys' views about honour, and, theoretically, to receive an education that should as nearly as possible conform to the pattern of that bestowed upon their brothers, they were never for a moment allowed to view the masculine sex as the superior sex. On the contrary, there was nothing, they were told, that a man could do which a woman could not do better. The old idea that women were not fitted for the professions that had hitherto been closed to them was being disproved every day. Miss Melody hoped to see many of her girls take their degrees, strike out careers for themselves....

Many of the girls responded enthusiastically, although the majority of them belonged to a class of society in which careers, other than that of matrimony, are scarcely yet tolerated for its daughters; and seldom contemplated by them, schooldays once over. They were enthusiastic, although they did not realize it, largely because of the excellent physical conditions under which they lived.

Games were played all the year round, at Bridgecrap. There was an elaborate gymnasium, and once a week the girls went to the swimming-baths. Lily was good-naturedly despised by them all for her absolute lack of athletic training or proficiency and total absence of muscle.

Just as at ten years old she had heard the opinion of her contemporaries at the convent, and been humiliated by it, so at Bridgecrap she met with an equal candour, clothed in the slang that was tolerated, if not actually permitted, from the pupils.

"Look here, Lily Thingamy, or whatever your name is, you'll have to stir your stumps a bit. Can't hold a whole hockey practice up for _you_, you know."

"Just look at this kid! Why, she hasn't any more muscle than a kitten. If she weren't so thin, she'd be disgustingly _flabby_!"

"You want backbone, that's what you want. It makes one sick to see anybody of your age who's never been taught what ragging means."

"My dear kid, it's no use saying you don't know the rules of the game. You've bally well _got_ to know them. What on earth _do_ you know, if you don't know anything about cricket?"

There were things that Lily did know, although she speedily became aware that the knowledge of them would not bring her to honour or triumph amongst the girls, and scarcely even amongst the mistresses. It was not accounted as particularly creditable to her, for instance, that she took a high place in the school, and retained it easily. More might have been made of it, but for the fact that all Miss Cleeve's conscientious teaching had never embraced the form of cramming known as taking examinations, and at Bridgecrap the taking of examinations was made the test of knowledge.

Consequently, however excellent her half year's work, Lily seldom succeeded in passing a test, to the form of which she was unaccustomed, and the lists were regularly headed by the captain of the hockey team, who had been at Bridgecrap nearly six years, possessed a capacity for hard work, a well-trained, mechanical memory, and no intellect whatever.

The mistresses were almost all primarily selected for their proficiency in games, except the French teacher, a Swiss lady who gave all her lessons in broken English.

The Scripture classes were taken by Miss Melody herself, in each of the three divisions of the school. History was imparted in the usual patchwork of dates, anecdotes, and names famous in Great Britain between the reign of King Alfred the Great and that of Queen Anne, geography was not taught beyond the Upper Third, botany was an extra, natural history ignored, and plain needlework not taught. Mathematics, except in the cases of one or two peculiarly constituted beings, presented itself to the girls, as to the majority of feminine minds, as a compound of meaningless "sums" that, if juggled with by a series of unrelated processes, might "come out right" at the end. Those of the pupils, Lily Stellenthorpe amongst them, who had least liking or aptitude for figures, received, by way of inculcating these, an hour's private and extra tuition in arithmetic once a week. Almost each one of them still surreptitiously counted upon her fingers, as little children do, believing it to be a form of cheating, but entirely unfamiliar with any more legitimate method of achieving the same result.

Literature, kept within the realms of English achievement, generally embraced one Shakespearean play thoroughly prepared, out of a school edition, for a coming examination. Shakespearean plays not judged suitable for this purpose, many of the girls did not even know by name. A few had "read Scott, because my young brother had to swot up 'Woodstock' last hols." Scarcely one could connect the name of any classic with that of its author, and all, without exception, would have felt heartily ashamed of being found, under no form of compulsion, to be reading poetry.

Few, it may be added, ran any such risk.

The religious principles of the school were Church of England, but religion, to Lily's relief, did not imply the insistent advertisement of outward and minor pieties that had prevailed at the convent.

A short daily service was held in the school chapel, and there were prayers morning and evening. Miss Melody held "Sunday talks" for the elder girls, of which the prevalent notes were brightness and broad-mindedness. Free discussions of Bible and Catechism readings were encouraged, with implicit avoidance of certain of the Commandments which apparently were not fit subjects for explanation.

Indeed, the nuns themselves could have displayed no more silent and resolute modesty than prevailed at Bridgecrap upon subjects that, sooner or later, must become of vital moment to every one of the feminine creatures there being educated.