Chapter I: Remain (5)

Laura took her last peep at the outside world, every evening, in the brief span of time between sunset and dark. Running up to the top of one of the hills, and letting her eyes range over sky and sea, she would drink in the scents that were waking to life after the burning heat of the day: salt water, warmed sand and seaweeds, ti-scrub, sour-grass, and the sturdy berry-bushes, high as her knee, through which she had ploughed her way. That was one of the moments she liked best, that, and lying in bed at night listening to the roar of the surf, which went on and on like a cannonade, even though the hill lay between. It made her flesh crawl, too, in delightful fashion, did she picture to herself how alone she and Pin were, in their room: the boys slept in the lean-to on the other side of the kitchen; old Anne at the back. For miles round, no house broke the solitude of the bush; only a thin wooden partition separated her from possible bushrangers, from the vastness and desolation of the night, the eternal booming of the sea.

Such was the life into which Laura now threw herself heart and soul, forgetting, in the sheer joy of living, her recent tribulation.

But even the purest pleasures WILL pall; and after a time, when the bloom had worn off and the newness and her mind was more at leisure again, she made some disagreeable discoveries which ruffled her tranquillity.

It was Pin, poor, fat, little well-meaning Pin, who did the mischief

Pin was not only changed in looks; her character had changed, too; and in so marked a way that before a week was out the sisters were at loggerheads. Each day made it plainer to Laura that Pin was developing a sturdy independence; she had ceased to look up to Laura as a prodigy of wisdom, and had begun to hold opinions of her own. She was, indeed, even disposed to be critical of her sister; and criticism from this quarter was more than Laura could brook: it was just as if a slave usurped his master's rights. At first speechless with surprise, she ended by losing her temper; the more, because Pin was prone to be mulish, and could not be got to budge, either by derision or by scorn, from her espoused views. They were those of the school at which for the past half-year she had been a day-pupil, and seemed to her unassailable. Laura found them ridiculous, as she did much else about Pin at this time: her ugliness, her setting herself up as an authority: and she jeered unkindly whenever Pin came out with them.--A still more ludicrous thing was that, despite her plainness, Pin actually had an admirer. True, she did not say so outright; perhaps she was not even aware of it; but Laura gathered from her talk that a boy at her school, a boy some three years older than herself, had given her a silk handkerchief and liked to help her with her sums.--And to Laura this was the most knockdown blow of all.

One day it came to an open quarrel between them.

They were lying on the beach after bathing, trying to protect their bare and blistered legs from the sandflies. Laura, flat on her back, had spread a towel over hers; Pin sat Turk--fashion with her legs beneath her and fought the flies with her hands. Having vainly endeavoured to draw from the reticent Laura some of those school-tales of which, in former holidays, she had been so prodigal, Pin was now chattering to her heart's content, about the small doings of home. Laura listened to her with the impatient toleration of one who has seen the world: she really could not be expected to interest herself in such trifles; and she laughed in her sleeve at Pin's simpleness. When, however, her little sister began to enlarge anew on some wonderful orders Mother had lately had, she could not refrain from saying crossly: "You've told me that a dozen times already. And you needn't bawl it out for everyone to hear."

"Oh, Laura! there isn't anyone anywhere near us ... and even if there were--why, I thought you'd be so pleased. Mother's going to give you an extra shilling pocket-money, 'cause of it."

"Of course I'm pleased. Don't be so silly, Pin."

"I'm not ALWAYS silly, Laura," protested Pin. "And I don't believe you ARE glad, a bit. Old Anne was, though. She said: 'Bless her dear heart!'"

"Old Anne? Well, I just wonder what next! It's none of her dashed business."

"Oh, Laura!" began Pin, growing tearful both at words and tone. "Why, Laura, you're not ashamed of it, are you?--that mother does sewing?"--and Pin opened her lobelia-blue eyes to their widest, showing what very big eyes they would be, were they not so often swollen with crying.

"Of course not," said Laura tartly. "But I'm blessed if I can see what it's got to do with old Anne."

"But she asked me ... what mother was working at--and if she'd got any new customers. She just loves mother."

"Like her cheek!" snapped Laura. "Poking her ugly old nose into what doesn't concern her. You should just have said you didn't know."

"But that would have been a story, Laura!" cried Pin, horrified "I did know--quite well."

"Goodness gracious, Pin, you----"

"I've never told a story in my life," said Pin hotly. "And I'm not going to either, for you or anyone. I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself."

"Hold your silly tongue!"

"I shan't, Laura. And I think you're very wicked. You're not a bit like what you used to be. And it's all going to school that's done it--Mother says it is."

"Oh, don't be such a blooming ass!" and Laura, stung to the quick, retaliated by taunting Pin with the change that had come to pass in her appearance. To her surprise, she found Pin grown inordinately touchy about her looks: at Laura's brutal statement of the truth she cried bitterly.

"I'm not, no, I'm not! I haven't got a full moon for a face! It's no fatter than yours. Sarah said last time you were home how fat you were getting."

"I'm sure I'm not," said Laura, indignant in her turn.

"Yes, you are," sobbed Pin. "But you only think other people are ugly, not yourself I'll tell mother what you've said as soon as ever I get home. And I'll tell her, too, you want to make me tell stories. And that I'm sure you've done something naughty at school, 'cause you won't ever talk about it. And how you're always saying bad words like blooming and gosh and golly--yes, I will!"

"You were always a sneak and a tell-tale."

"And you were always a greedy, selfish, deceitful thing."

"You don't know anything about me, you numbskull, you!"

"I don't want to! I know you're a bad, wicked girl."

After this exchange of home truths, they did not speak to each other for two days: Pin had a temper that smouldered, and could not easily forgive. So she stayed at old Anne's side, helping to bake scones and leatherjackets; or trotted after the boys, who had dropped into the way of saying: "Come on, little Pin!" as they never said: "Come on, Laura!" and Laura retired in lonely dudgeon to the beach.

She took the estrangement so much to heart that she eased her feelings by abusing Pin in thought; Pin was a pig-headed little ignoramus, as timid as ever of setting one foot before the other. And the rest of them would be just the same--old stick-in-the muds, unchanged by a hair, or, if they HAD changed, then changed for the worse. Laura had somehow never foreseen the day on which she would find herself out of tune with her home circle; with unthinking assurance she had expected that Pin, for instance, would always be eager to keep pace with her. Now, she saw that her little sister would probably never catch up to her again. Such progress as Pin might make--if she were not already glued firm to her silly notions--would be in quite another direction. For the quarrel had made one thing plain to Laura: with regard to her troubles, she need not look to Pin for sympathy: if Pin talked such gibberish at the hint of putting off an inquisitive old woman, what would she--and not she alone--what would they all say to the tissue of lies Laura had spun round Mr. Shepherd, a holy man, a clergyman, and a personal friend of Mother's into the bargain? She could not blink the fact that, did it come to their ears, they would call her in earnest, what Pin had called her in her temper--bad and wicked. Home was, alas! no longer the snug nest in which she was safe from the slings and shanghais of the world.

And then there was another thing: did she stay at home, she would have to re-live herself into the thousand and one gimcrack concerns, which now, as set forth by Pin, so bored her: the colic Leppie had brought on by eating unripe fruit; the fact that another of Sarah's teeth had dropped out without extraneous aid. It was all very well for a week or two, but, at the idea of shutting herself wholly up with such mopokes, of cutting herself off from her present vital interests, Laura hastily reconsidered her decision to leave school. No: badly as she had suffered at her companions' hands, much as she dreaded returning, it was at school she belonged. All her heart was there: in the doings of her equals, the things that really mattered--who would be promoted, who prefect, whose seat changed in the dining-hall.--Besides, could one who had experienced the iron rule of Mr. Strachey, or Mrs. Gurley, ever be content to go back and just form one of a family of children? She not, at any rate!

Thus she lay, all day long, her hands clasped under her neck, a small white speck on the great wave-lapped beach. She watched the surf break, watched the waves creep up and hide the reef, watched the gulls vanish in the sun-saturated blue overhead. Sometimes she rose to her elbow to follow a ship just inside the horizon; and it pleased her to think that this great boat was sailing off, with a load of lucky mortals, to some unknown, fairer world, while she, a poor Cinderella, had to stop behind--even though she knew it was only the English mail going on to Sydney. Of Pin she preferred not to think; nor could she dwell with equanimity on her late misfortunes at school and the trials that awaited her on her reappearance; and since she HAD to think of something, she fell into the habit of making up might-have-been, of narrating to herself how things would have fallen out had her fictions been fact, her ascetic hero the impetuous lover she had made of him.--In other words, lying prostrate on the sand, Laura went on with her story.

When, towards the end of the third week, she and Pin were summoned to spend some days with Godmother, she had acquired such a gusto for this occupation, that she preferred to shirk reality, and let Pin pay the visit alone.

XX.

WIE SOLLTE EIN STROM NICHT ENDLICH DEN WEG ZUM MEERE FINDEN!

NIETZSCHE

Sea, sun and air did their healing work, as did also the long, idle days in the home garden; and Laura drank in health and vigour with every breath.

She had need of it all when, the golden holidays over, she returned to school; for the half-year that broke was, in many ways, the most trying she had yet had to face. True, her dupes' first virulence had waned--they no longer lashed her openly with their tongues--but the quiet, covert insults, that were now the rule, were every bit as hard to bear; and before a week had passed Laura was telling herself that, had she been a Christian Martyr, she would have preferred to be torn asunder with one jerk, rather than submit to the thumbkin. Not an eye but looked askance at her; on every face was painted a reminder of her moral inferiority; and even newcomers among the boarders soon learnt, without always knowing what her crime had been, that Laura Rambotham was "not the thing".

This system of slight and disparagement was similar to what she had had to endure in her first school term; but its effect upon her was different. Then, in her raw timidity, she had bowed her head beneath it; now, she could not be so lamb-like. In thought, she never ceased to lay half the blame of what had happened on her companions' shoulders; and she was embittered by their injustice in making her alone responsible, when all she had done was to yield to their craving for romance. She became a rebel, wrapping herself round in the cloak of bitterness which the outcasts of fortune wear, feeding on her hate of those within the pale. Very well then, she said to herself: if her fellows chose to shut her out like this, she would stop outside, and never see eye to eye with them again. And it gave her an unholy pleasure to mock, in secret, at all they set store by.

Her outward behaviour for many a day was, none the less, that of a footlicker; and by no sign did she indicate what she really was--a very unhappy girl. Like most rebels of her sex, she ardently desired to re-enter the fold of law and order; and it was to this end she worked, although, wherever she approached it, the place seemed to bristle with spears. But she did not let herself be daunted; she pocketed injuries, pretended not to hear them, played the spaniel to people she despised; and it soon became open talk, that no matter what you said to her, Laura Rambotham would not take offence. You could also rely on her to do a dirty job for you.--A horrid little toady was the verdict; especially of those who had no objection to be toadied to.

Torn thus, between mutinous sentiments on the one hand, a longing for restitution on the other, Laura grew very sly--a regular little tactician. In these days, she was for ever considering what she ought to do, what to leave undone. She learnt to weigh her words before uttering them, instead of blurting out her thoughts in the childish fashion that had exposed her to ridicule; she learnt, too, at last, to keep her real opinions to herself, and to make those she expressed tally with her hearers'. And she was quick to discover that this was a short-cut towards regaining her lost place: to conceal what she truly felt--particularly if her feelings ran counter to those of the majority. For, the longer she was at school, the more insistently the truth was driven home to her, that the majority is always in the right.

In the shifting of classes that took place at the year's end, she left the three chief witnesses of her disgrace--Tilly, Maria, Kate--behind her. She was again among a new set of girls. But this little piece of luck was outweighed by the fact that, shortly after Christmas, her room was changed for the one occupied by M. P., and M. P.'s best friend.

So far, Laura had hardly dared to lift her eyes in Mary Pidwall's presence. For Mary knew not only the sum of her lies, but also held--or so Laura believed--that she came of a thoroughly degenerate family; thanks to Uncle Tom. And the early weeks spent at close quarters with her bore out these fears. The looks both M. P. and her friend bent on Laura said as plainly as words: if we are forced to tolerate this obnoxious little insect about us, we can at least show it just what a horrid little beast it is.--M. P. in particular was adamant, unrelenting; Laura quailed at the sound of her step.

And yet she soon felt, rightly enough, it was just in the winning over of this stern, rigid nature that her hope of salvation lay. If she could once get M. P. on her side, all might yet be well again.

So she began to lay siege to Mary's good-will--to Mary, who took none but the barest notice of her, even in the bedroom ignoring her as if she did not exist, and giving the necessary orders, for she was the eldest of the three, in tones of ice. But it needed a great wariness on Laura's part. And, in the beginning, she made a mistake. She was a toadeater here, too, seeking to curry favour with M. P. as with the rest, by fawning on her, in a way for which she could afterwards have hit herself. For it did not answer; M. P. had only a double disdain for the cringer, knowing nothing herself of the pitfalls that lie in wait for a temperament like Laura's. Mary's friendship was extended to none but those who had a lofty moral standard; and truthfulness and honesty were naturally the head virtues on her list. Laura was sharp enough to see that, if she wished to gain ground with M. P. she must make a radical change in her tactics. It was not enough, where Mary was in question, to play the echo. Did she, Laura, state an opinion, she must say what she meant, above all, mean what she said, and stick manfully to it, instead of, at the least hint, being ready to fly over to Mary's point of view: always though, of course, with the disquieting proviso in the background that her own opinions were such as she ought to have, and not heretical leanings that shocked and dismayed. In which case, there was nothing for it but to go on being mum.

She ventured, moreover, little unobtrusive services, to which she thought neither of the girls could take exception; making their beds for them in the morning, and staying up last at night to put out the light. And once she overheard the friend, who was called Cupid, say: "You know, M. P., she's not such a bad little stick after all."--But then Cupid was easy-going, and inclined to be original.

May answered: "She's no doubt beginning to see she can't lie to US. But she's a very double-faced child."

It was also with an eye to M. P.'s approval that Laura threw herself, with renewed zeal, upon her work. And in those classes that called only for the exercise of her memory, she soon sat high. The reason why she could not mount still higher was that M. P. occupied the top place, and was not to be moved, even had Laura dreamed of attempting it.

And at length, after three months of unremitting exertion in the course of which, because she had little peeps of what looked like success, the rebel in her went to sleep again--at length Laura had her reward. One Sunday morning M. P. asked her to be her partner on the walk to church. This was as if a great poet should bend from his throne to take a younger brother-singer by the hand; and, in her headlong fashion, Laura all but fell at the elder girl's feet. From this day forward she out-heroded Herod, in her efforts to make of herself exactly what Mary thought she ought to be.

Deep within her, none the less, there lurked a feeling which sometimes made as if to raise its head: a feeling that she did not really like M. P., or admire her, or respect her; one which, had it come quite to life, would have kicked against Mary's authority, been contemptuous of her unimaginative way of seeing and saying things, on the alert to remind its owner that HER way, too, had a right to existence. But is was not strong enough to make itself heard, or rather Laura refused to hear it, and turned a deaf ear whenever it tried to hint at its presence.--For Mr. Worldly-Wiseman was her model just now.

Whereas Cupid--there was something in Cupid that was congenial to her. A plain girl, with irregular features--how she had come by her nickname no one knew--Cupid was three years older than Laura, and one of the few in the school who loved reading for its own sake. In a manner, she was cleverer even than M. P.; but it was not a school-booky way, and hence was not thought much of. However, Laura felt drawn to her at once--even though Cupid treated her as quite a little girl--and they sometimes got as far as talking of books they had read. From this whiff of her, Laura was sure that Cupid would have had more understanding than M. P. for her want of veracity; for Cupid had a kind of a dare-devil mind in a hidebound character, and was often very bold of speech.

Yet it was not Cupid's good opinion she worked for, with might and main.

The rate of her upward progress in Mary's estimation could be gauged by the fact that the day came when the elder girl spoke openly to her of her crime. At the first merciless words Laura winced hotly, both at and for the tactlessness of which Mary was guilty. But, the first shameful stab over, she felt the better of it; yes, it was a relief to speak to some one of what she had borne alone for so long. To speak of it, and even to argue round it a little; for, like most wrongdoers, Laura soon acquired a taste for dwelling on her misdeed. And Mary, being entirely without humour, and also unversed in dealing with criminals, did not divine that this was just a form of self-indulgence. It was Cupid who said: "Look here, Infant, you'll be getting cocky about what you did, if you don't look out."

Mary would not allow that a single one of Laura's excuses held water.

"That's the sheerest nonsense. You don't seem to realise that you tried to defame another person's moral character," she said, in the assured, superior way that so impressed Laura.--And this aspect of the case, which had never once occurred to her, left Laura open-mouthed; and yet a little doubtful: Mr. Shepherd was surely too far above her, and too safely ensconced in holiness, to be injured by anything she might say. But the idea gave her food for thought; and she even tentatively developed her story along these unfamiliar lines, just to see how it might have turned out.

One night as they were undressing for bed, Mary spoke, with the same fireless depreciation, of the behaviour of a classmate which had been brought to her notice that day. This girl was said to have nefariously "copied" from another, in the course of a written examination; and, as prefect of her class Mary was bound to track the evil down. "I shall make them both show me their papers as soon as they get them back; and then, if I find proof of what's being said, I must tackle her. Just as I tackled you, Laura."

Laura flushed. "Oh, M. P., I've never 'copied' in my life!" she cried.

"Probably not. But those things all belong in the same box: lying, and 'copying', and stealing."

"You never WILL believe me when I say I didn't know anything about that horrid Chinky. I only told a few crams--that was quite different."

"I think it's most unfortunate, Laura, that you persist in clinging to that idea."

Here M. P. was obliged to pause; for she had put a lock of hair between her teeth while she did something to a plait at the back. As soon as she could speak again, she went on: "You and your few crams! Have you ever thought, pray, what a state of things it would be, if we all went about telling false-hoods, and saying it didn't matter, they were merely a few little fibs?--What are you laughing at?"

"I'm not laughing. I mean ... I just smiled. I was only thinking how funny it would be--Sandy, and old Gurley, and Jim Chapman, all going round making up things that had never happened."

"You've a queer notion of what's funny. Have you utterly no respect for the truth?"

"Yes, of course I have. But I say"--Laura, who always slipped quickly out of her clothes, was sitting in her nightgown on the edge of the bed, hugging her knees. "I say, M. P., if everybody told stories, and everybody knew everybody else was telling them, then truth wouldn't be any good any more at all, would it? If nobody used it?"

"What rubbish you do talk!" said Mary serenely, as she shook her toothbrush on to a towel and rubbed it dry.

"As if truth were a soap!" remarked Cupid who was already in bed, reading NANA, and trying to smoke a cigarette under the blankets.

"You can't do away with truth, child."

"But why not? Who says so? It isn't a law."

"Don't try to be so sharp, Laura."

"I don't mean to, M. P.--But what IS truth, anyhow?" asked Laura.

"The Bible is truth. Can you do away with the Bible, pray?"

"Of course not. But M. P.... The Bible isn't quite all truth, you know. My father----" here she broke off in some confusion, remembering Uncle Tom.

"Well, what about him? You don't want to say, I hope, that he didn't believe in the Bible?"

Laura drove back the: "Of course not!" that was all but over her lips. "Well, not exactly," she said, and grew very red. "But you KNOW, M. P., whales don't have big enough throats ever to have swallowed Jonah."

"Little girls shouldn't talk about what they don't understand. The Bible is God's Word; and God is Truth."

"You're a silly infant," threw in Cupid, coughing as she spoke. "Truth has got to be--and honesty, too. If it didn't exist, there couldn't be any state, or laws, or any social life. It's one of the things that makes men different from animals, and the people who boss us know pretty well what they're about, you bet when they punish the ruffians who don't practise it."

"Yes, now THAT I see," agreed Laura eagerly. "Then truth's a useful thing.--Oh, and that's probably what it means, too, when you say: Honesty is the best Policy."

"I never heard such a child," said M. P., shocked. "Cupid, you really shouldn't put such things into her head.--You're down-right immoral, Laura."

"Oh, how CAN you say such a horrid thing?"

"Well, your ideas are simply dreadful. You ought to try your hardest to improve them."

"I do, M. P., really I do."

"You don't succeed. I think there must be a screw loose in you somewhere."

"Anyhow, I vote we adjourn this meeting," said Cupid, recovering from a fresh cough and splutter. "Or old Gurley'll be coming in to put me on a mustard plaster.--As for you, Infant, if you take the advice of a chap who has seen life, you'll keep your ideas to yourself: they're too crude for this elegant world."

"Right you are!" said Laura cheerfully.

She was waiting by the gas-jet till M.P. had folded her last garment, and she shuffled her bare feet one over the other as she stood; for it was a cold night. The light out, she hopped into bed in the dark.

XXI.

But the true seal was set on her regeneration when she was invited to join the boarders' Literary Society; of which Cupid and Mary were the leading spirits. This carried her back, at one stroke, into the swing of school life. For everybody who was anybody belonged to the society. And, despite her friendship with the head of her class, Laura still knew what it was to get the cold shoulder.

But this was to some extent her own fault. At the present stage of her career she was an extraordinarily prickly child, and even to her two sponsors did not at times present a very amiable outside: like a hedgehog, she was ever ready to shoot out her spines. With regard, that is, to her veracity. She had been so badly grazed, in her recent encounter, that she was now constantly seeing doubt where no doubt was; and this wakeful attitude of suspicion towards others did not make for brotherly love. The amenity of her manners suffered, too: though she kept to her original programme of not saying all she thought, yet what she was forced to say she blurted out in such a precise and blunt fashion that it made a disagreeable impression. At the same time, a growing pedantry in trifles warped both her imagination and her sympathies: under the aegis of M. P., she rapidly learned to be the latter's rival in an adherence to bald fact, and in her contumely for those who departed from it. Indeed, before the year spent in Mary's company was out, Laura was well on the way towards becoming one of those uncomfortable people who, concerned only for their own salvation, fire the truth at you on every occasion, without regard for your tender places.--So she remained but scantly popular.

Hence, her admission to the Literary Society augured well.

Her chief qualifications for membership were that she could make verses, and was also very fond of reading. At school, however, this taste had been quiescent; for books were few. Still, she had read whatever she could lay hands on, and for the past half-year or more she had fared like a little pig in a clover field. Since Christmas, she was one of the few permitted to do morning practice on the grand piano in Mrs. Strachey's drawing-room--an honour, it is true, not overmuch valued by its recipients, for Mrs. Gurley's bedroom lay just above, and that lady could swoop down on whoever was weak enough to take a little rest. But Laura snapped her fingers at such a flimsy objection; for this was the wonderful room round the walls of which low, open bookshelves ran; and she was soon bold enough, on entering, hastily to select a book to read while she played, always on the alert to pop it behind her music, should anyone come into the room.

For months, she browsed unchecked. As her choice had to be made with extreme celerity, and from those shelves nearest the piano, it was in the nature of things that it was not invariably a happy one. For some time she had but moderate luck, and sampled queer foods. To these must be reckoned a translation of FAUST, which she read through, to the end of the First Part at least, with a kind of dreary wonder why such a dull thing should be called great. For her next repast, she sought hard and it was in the course of this rummage that she had the strangest find of all. Running a skilled eye over the length of a shelf close at hand, she hit on a slim, blue volume, the title of which at once arrested her attention. For, notwithstanding her fourteen years, and her dabblings in Richardson and Scott, Laura's liking for a real child's book was as strong as it had ever been; and A DOLL'S HOUSE seemed to promise good things. Deftly extracting the volume, she struck up her scales and began to read.

This was the day on which, after breakfast, Mrs. Gurley pulverised her with the remark: "A new, and, I must say, extremely interesting, fashion of playing scales, Laura Rambotham! To hold, the forte pedal down, from beginning to end!"

Laura was unconscious of having sinned in this way. But it might quite well be so. For she had spent a topsy-turvy, though highly engrossing hour. In place of the children's story she anticipated, she had found herself, on opening the book, confronted by the queerest stuff she had ever seen in print. From the opening sentence on. To begin with, it was a play--and Laura had never had a modern prose play in her hand before--and then it was all about the oddest, yet the most commonplace people. It seemed to her amazingly unreal--how these people spoke and behaved--she had never known anyone like them; and yet again so true, in the way it dragged in everyday happenings, so petty in its rendering of petty things, that it bewildered and repelled her: why, some one might just as well write a book about Mother or Sarah! Her young, romantic soul rose in arms against this, its first bluff contact with realism, against such a dispiriting sobriety of outlook. Something within her wanted to cry out in protest as she read--for read she did, on three successive days, with an interest she could not explain. And that was not all. It was worse that the people in this book--the extraordinary person who was married, and had children, and yet ate biscuits out of a bag and said she didn't; the man who called her his lark and his squirrel--as if any man ever did call his wife such names!--all these people seemed eternally to be meaning something different from what they said; something that was for ever eluding her. It was most irritating.-- There was, moreover, no mention of a doll's house in the whole three acts.

The state of confusion this booklet left her in, she allayed with a little old brown leather volume of Longfellow. And HYPERION was so much more to her liking that she even ventured to borrow it from its place on the shelf, in order to read it at her leisure, braving the chance that her loan, were it discovered, might be counted against her as a theft.

It hung together, no doubt, with the after-effects of her dip into Ibsen that, on her sitting down to write the work that was to form her passport to the Society, her mind should incline to the most romantic of romantic themes. Not altogether, though: Laura's taste, such as it was, for literature had, like all young people's, a mighty bias towards those books which turned their backs on reality: she sought not truth, but the miracle. However, though she had thus taken sides, there was still a yawning gap to be bridged between her ready acceptance of the honourable invitation, and the composition of a masterpiece. Thanks to her wonted inability to project her thoughts beyond the moment, she had been so unthinking of possible failure that Cupid had found it necessary to interject: "Here, I say, don't blow!" Whereas, when she came to write, she sat with her pen poised over the paper for nearly half an hour, without bringing forth a word. First, there was the question of form: she considered, then abruptly dismissed, the idea of writing verses: the rhymes with love and dove, and heart and part, which could have been managed, were, she felt, too silly and sentimental to be laid before her quizzical audience. Next, what to write about--a simple theme, such as a fairy-tale, was not for a moment to be contemplated. No, Laura had always flown her hawk high, and she was now bent on making a splutter. It ended by being a toss-up between a play in the Shakesperian manner and a novel after Scott. She decided on the novel. It should be a romance of Venice, with abundant murder and mystery in it, and a black, black villain, such as her soul loved--no macaroon-nibblers or rompers with children for her! And having thus attuned her mind to scarlet deeds, she set to work. But she found it tremendously difficult to pin her story to paper: she saw things clearly enough, and could have related them by word of mouth; but did she try to write them down they ran to mist; and though she toiled quite literally in the sweat of her brow, yet when the eventful day came she had but three niggardly pages to show for her pains.

About twenty girls formed the Society, which assembled one Saturday evening in an empty music-room. All were not, of course, equally productive: some had brought it no further than a riddle: and it was just these drones who, knowing nothing of the pother composition implied, criticised most stringently the efforts of the rest. Several members had pretty enough talents, Laura's two room-mates among the number: on the night Laura made her debut, the weightiest achievement was, without doubt, M. P.'s essay on "Magnanimity"; and Laura's eyes grew moist as she listened to its stirring phrases. Next best--to her thinking, at least--was a humorous episode by Cupid, who had a gift that threw Laura into a fit of amaze; and this was the ability to expand infinitely little into infinitely much; to rig out a trifle in many words, so that in the end it seemed ever so much bigger than it really was--just as a thrifty merchant boils his oranges, to swell them to twice their size.

Laura being the youngest member, her affair came last on the programme: she had to sit and listen to the others, her cheeks hot, her hands very cold. Presently all were done, and then Cupid, who was chairman, called on "a new author, Rambotham, who it is hoped will prove a valuable acquisition to the Society, to read us his maiden effort".

Laura rose to her feet and, trembling with nervousness, stuttered forth her prose. The three little pages shot past like a flash; she had barely stood up before she was obliged to sit down again, leaving her hearers, who had only just re-adopted their listening attitudes, agape with astonishment. She could have endured, with phlegm, the ridicule this malheur earned her: what was harder to stomach was that her paper heroics made utterly no impression. She suffered all the humiliation of a flabby fiasco, and, till bedtime, shrank out of her friends' way.

"You were warned not to be too cocky, you know," Mary said judicially, on seeing her downcast air.

"I didn't mean to be, really.--Then you don't think what I wrote was up to much, M. P.?"

"Mm," said the elder girl, in a non-committal way.

Here Cupid chimed in. "Look here, Infant, I want to ask you something. Have you ever been in Venice?"

"No."

"Ever seen a gondola?"

"No."

"Or the Doge's palace?--or a black-cloaked assassin?--or a masked lady?"

"You know I haven't," murmured Laura, humbled to the dust.

"And probably never will. Well then, why on earth try to write wooden, second-hand rubbish like that?"

"Second-hand? ... But Cupid ... think of Scott! He couldn't have seen half he told about?"

"My gracious!" ejaculated Cupid, and sat down and fanned herself with a hairbrush. "You don't imagine you're a Scott, do you? Here, hold me, M. P., I'm going to faint!"--and at Laura's quick and scarlet denial, she added: "Well, why the unmentionable not use the eyes the Lord has given you, and write about what's before them every day of your life?"

"Do you think that would be better?"

"I don't think--I know it would."

But Laura was not so easily convinced as all that.

Ever a talented imitator, she next tried her hand at an essay on an abstract subject. This was a failure: you could not SEE things, when you wrote about, say, "Beneficence"; and Laura's thinking was done mainly in pictures. Matters were still worse when she tinkered at Cupid's especial genre: her worthless little incident stared at her, naked and scraggy, from the sheet; she had no wealth of words at her disposal in which to deck it out. So, with a sigh, she turned back to the advice Cupid had given her, and prepared to make a faithful transcript of actuality. She called what she now wrote: "A Day at School", and conscientiously set down detail on detail; so fearful, this time, of over-brevity, that she spun the account out to twenty pages; though the writing of it was as distasteful to her as her reading of A DOLL'S HOUSE had been.

At the subsequent meeting of the Society, expression of opinion was not lacking.

"Oh, Jehoshaphat! How much more?"

"Here, let me get out. I've had enough."

"I say, you forgot to count how many steps it took you to come downstairs."

Till the chairman had pity on the embarrassed author and said: "Look here, Laura, I think you'd better keep the rest for another time."

"It was just what you told me to do," Laura reproached Cupid that night: she was on the brink of tears.

But Cupid was disinclined to shoulder the responsibility. "Told you to be as dull and long-winded as that? Infant, it's a whacker!"

"But it was TRUE what I wrote--every word of it."

Neither of the two elder girls was prepared to discuss this vital point. Cupid shifted ground. "Good Lord, Laura, but it's hard to drive a thing into YOUR brain-pan.--You don't need to be ALL true on paper, silly child!"

"Last time you said I had to."

"Well, if you want it, my candid opinion is that you haven't any talent for this kind of thing.--Now turn off the gas."

As the light in the room went out, a kind of inner light seemed to go up in Laura; and both then and on the following days she thought hard. She was very ambitious, anxious to shine, not ready to accept defeat; and to the next literary contest she brought the description of an excursion to the hills and gullies that surrounded Warrenega; into which she had worked an adventure with some vagrant blacks. She and Pin and the boys had often picnicked on these hills, with their lunches packed in billies; and she had seen the caves and rocky holes where blackfellows were said to have hidden themselves in early times; but neither this particular excursion, nor the exciting incident which she described with all the aplomb of an eyewitness, had ever taken place. That is to say: not a word of her narration was true, but every word of it might have been true.

And with this she had an unqualified success.

"I believe there's something in you after all," said Cupid to her that night. "Anyhow, you know now what it is to be true, yet not dull and prosy."

And Laura manfully choked back her desire to cry out that not a word of her story was fact.

She was long in falling asleep. Naturally, she was elated and excited by her success; but also a new and odd piece of knowledge had niched itself in her brain. It was this. In your speech, your talk with others, you must be exact to the point of pedantry, and never romance or draw the long-bow; or you would be branded as an abominable liar. Whereas, as soon as you put pen to paper, provided you kept one foot planted on probability, you might lie as hard as you liked: indeed, the more vigorously you lied, the louder would be your hearers' applause.

And Laura fell asleep over a chuckle.

XXII.

UND VERGESST MIR AUCH DAS GUTE LACHEN NICHT!

NIETZSCHE

And then, alas! just as she rode high on this wave of approbation, Laura suffered another of those drops in the esteem of her fellows, another of those mental upsets, which from time to time had thrown her young life out of gear.

True, what now came was not exactly her own fault; though it is doubtful whether a single one of her companions would have made her free of an excuse. They looked on, round-eyed, mouths a-stretch. Once more, the lambkin called Laura saw fit to sunder itself from the flock, and to cut mad capers in sight of them all. And their delectation was as frank as their former wrath had been.--As for Laura, as usual she did not stop to think till it was too late; but danced lightly away to her own undoing.

The affair began pleasantly enough. A member of the Literary Society was the girl with the twinkly brown eyes--she who had gone out of her way to give Laura a kindly word after the Shepherd debacle. This girl, Evelyn Souttar by name, was also the only one of the audience who had not joined in the laugh provoked by Laura's first appearance as an author. Laura had never forgotten this; and she would smile shyly at Evelyn when their looks met. But a dozen reasons existed why there should have been no further rapport between them. Although now in the fifth form, Laura had remained childish for her age: whereas Evelyn was over eighteen, and only needed to turn up her hair to be quite grown-up. She had matriculated the previous Christmas, and was at present putting away a rather desultory half-year, before leaving school for good. In addition, she was rich, pampered and very pretty--the last comrade in the world for drab little Laura.

One evening, as the latter was passing through the dining-hall, she found Evelyn, who studied where she chose, disconsolately running her fingers through her gold-brown hair.

"I say, Kiddy," she called to Laura. "You know Latin, don't you? Just give us a hand with this."--Latin had not been one of Evelyn's subjects, and she was now employing some of her spare time in studying the language with Mr. Strachey, who taught it after a fashion of his own. "How on earth would you say: 'We had not however rid here so long, but should have tided it up the river'? What's the old fool mean by that?" and she pushed an open volume of ROBINSON CRUSOE towards Laura.

Laura helped to the best of her ability.

"Thanks awfully," said Evelyn. "You're a clever chickabiddy. But you must let me help you with something in return. What's hardest?"

"Filling baths and papering rooms," replied Laura candidly.

"Arithmetic, eh? Well, if ever you want a sum done, come to me."

But Laura was temperamentally unable to accept so vague an invitation; and here the matter closed.

When, consequently, Miss Chapman summoned her one evening to tell her that she was to change her present bedroom for Evelyn's, the news came as a great shock to her.

"Change my room?" she echoed, in slow disgust. "Oh, I can't, Miss Chapman!"

"You've got to, Laura, if Mrs. Gurley says so," expostulated the kindly governess.

"But I won't! There MUST be some mistake. Just when I'm so comfortably settled, too.--Very well, then, Miss Chapman, I'll speak to Mrs. Gurley myself."

She carried out this threat, and, for daring to question orders, received the soundest snubbing she had had for many a long day.

That night she was very bitter about it all, and the more so because Mary and Cupid did not, to her thinking, show sufficient sympathy.

"I believe you're both glad I'm going. It's a beastly shame. Why must I always be odd man out?"

"Look here, Infant, don't adopt that tone, please," said Cupid magisterially. "Or you'll make us glad in earnest. People who are always up in arms about things are the greatest bores in the world."

So the following afternoon Laura wryly took up armfuls of her belongings, mounted a storey higher, and deposited them on the second bed in Evelyn's room.

The elder girl had had this room to herself for over a year now, and Laura felt sure would be chafing inwardly at her intrusion. For days she stole mousily in and out, avoiding the hours when Evelyn was there, getting up earlier in the morning, hurrying into bed at night and feeling very sore indeed at the sufferance on which she supposed herself to be.

But once Evelyn caught her and said: "Don't, for gracious' sake, knock each time you want to come in, child. This is your room now as well as mine."

Laura reddened, and blurted out something about knowing how she must hate to have HER stuck in there.

Evelyn wrinkled up her forehead and laughed. "What rot! Do you think I'd have asked to have you, if I hated it so much?"

"You asked to have me?" gasped Laura.

"Of course--didn't you know? Old Gurley said I'd need to have some one; so I chose you."

Laura was too dumbfounded, and too diffident, to ask the grounds of such a choice. But the knowledge that it was so, worked an instant change in her.

In all the three years she had been at school, she had not got beyond a surface friendliness with any of her fellows. Even those who had been her "chums" had wandered like shades through the groves of her affection: rough, teasing Bertha; pretty, lazy Inez; perky Tilly, slangily frank Maria and Kate, Mary and her moral influence, clever, instructive Cupid: to none of them had she been drawn by any deeper sense of affinity. And though she had come to believe, in the course of the last, more peaceful year, that she had grown used to being what you would call an unpopular girl--one, that is, with whom no one ever shared a confidence--yet seldom was there a child who longed more ardently to be liked, or suffered more acutely under dislike. Apart however from the brusque manner she had contracted, in her search after truth, it must be admitted that Laura had but a small talent for friendship; she did not grasp the constant give-and-take intimacy implies; the liking of others had to be brought to her, unsought, she, on the other hand, being free to stand back and consider whether or no the feeling was worth returning. And friends are not made in this fashion.

But Evelyn had stoutly, and without waiting for permission, crossed the barrier; and each new incident in her approach was pleasanter than the last. Laura was pleased, and flattered, and round the place where her heart was, she felt a warm and comfortable glow.

She began to return the liking, with interest, after the manner of a lonely, bottled-up child. And everything about Evelyn made it easy to grow fond of her. To begin with, Laura loved pretty things and pretty people; and her new friend was out and away the prettiest girl in the school. Then, too, she was clever, and that counted; you did not make a friend of a fool. But her chief characteristics were a certain sound common sense, and an inexhaustible fund of good-nature--a careless, happy, laughing sunniness, that was as grateful to those who came into touch with it as a rare ointment is grateful to the skin. This kindliness arose, it might be, in the first place from indolence: it was less trouble to be merry and amiable than to put oneself out to be selfish, which also meant standing a fire of disagreeable words and looks; and then, too, it was really hard for one who had never had a whim crossed to be out of humour. But, whatever its origin, the good-nature was there, everlastingly; and Laura soon learnt that she could cuddle in under it, and be screened by it, as a lamb is screened by its mother's woolly coat.

Evelyn was the only person who did not either hector her, or feel it a duty to clip and prune at her: she accepted Laura for what she was--for herself. Indeed, she even seemed to lay weight on Laura's bits of opinions, which the girl had grown so chary of offering; and, under the sunshine of this treatment, Laura shot up and flowered like a spring bulb. She began to speak out her thoughts again; she unbosomed herself of dark little secrets; and finally did what she would never have believed possible: sitting one night in her nightgown, on the edge of Evelyn's bed, she made a full confession of the pickle she had got herself into, over her visit to the Shepherds.

To her astonishment, Evelyn, who was already in bed, laughed till the tears ran down her cheeks. At Laura's solemn-faced incredulity she said:

"I say, Kiddy, but that WAS rich. To think a chicken of your size sold them like that. It's the best joke I've heard for an age. Tell us again--from the beginning."

Nothing loath Laura started in afresh, and in this, the second telling, embroidered the edge of her tale with a few fancy stitches, in a way she had not ventured on for months past; so that Evelyn was more tickled than before.

"No wonder they were mad about being had like that. You little rascal!"

She was equally amused by Laura's description of the miserable week she had spent, trying to make up her mind to confess.

"You ridiculous sprat! Why didn't you come to me? We'd have let them down with a good old bump."

But Laura could not so easily forget the humiliations she had been forced to suffer, and delicately hinted to her friend at M. P.'s moral strictures. With her refreshing laugh, Evelyn brushed these aside as well.

"Tommyrot! Never mind that old jumble-sale of all the virtues. It was jolly clever of a mite like you to bamboozle them as you did--take my word for that."