Chapter ONE: Vowel-Sounds

I

You could never be quite sure how Mrs. Lysaght would take anything. Even thin Miss Winter, the Secretary, who must have loved her or she could never have stood it, went about her duties murmuring, “I _hope_ I’ve done right....” And, as Miss Fairfax said, you could feel the pit of the poor thing’s stomach sink on _hope_. Miss Fairfax was a little coarse at times: like a man. It was the result of a classical tripos. Gillian had gathered this from Mrs. Lysaght on the bewildering occasion when she had first received the head mistress’s instructions, at tea. Mrs. Lysaght had been in bed that afternoon.

“I seize every opportunity of rest—facing the light—so revealing—and thick bread and butter—you will not mind, dear.”

Gillian did mind being called “dear,” and the bread and butter was certainly thick; but she was so much engrossed in wondering how Mrs. Lysaght either rested or enjoyed whatever revelation the faced light might bring (though quite in bed) while eating thick bread and butter, interviewing a junior mistress and writing what might be a diary and again might at the same time be a prospectus, with one of those collapsible gold pencils which requires to be un-collapsed every half-page or so, that she missed the next two hundred words—you couldn’t call any of Mrs. Lysaght’s utterances sentences—and only caught up with those on which she left Miss Fairfax.

“Sound scholarship but coarseness—very sad—still the Greeks—_and_ the Romans—passages in the Epistles—and the Joint Board’s set-books this year—Satires, dear—Horace—_such_ a pity—English purity—French refinement—Yours so different.”

Gillian, whose subjects were English and Foreign Literature (“foreign” being a term comprehending French and German only), found her mind rocketing between _Le Misanthrope_ and _Hamlet_, also “set-books” that year, with horrid memories of lines the full significance of which she had never quite explored herself, but which in her new capacity she was now about to purvey to the young and inquisitive. What, for example, was the grosser name that liberal shepherds gave...?

“Correlate—always correlate.” Mrs. Lysaght was getting a little breathless and the lead had sunk below the rim of the gold case of her pencil. “References to History—dear Miss Parratt, so essentially refined—to Geography and Botany—the whole time-table—especially in the middle forms, and, whenever possible in _dramatic_ form. The teaching of the Church, dear, Miracle and Mystery Plays—on the chest of drawers, dear—a little red box. Thank you—the school motto—_our utmost for the highest_—once a week for five minutes in every subject—and _low_-heeled shoes—ah! no—that was little Miss Battinson—but Saint Paul—infallible—if only _all_ women—but you with such a father will know how right....”

On the way home Gillian met Miss Fairfax.

“Well, child,” said the classical mistress, “did you count the finite verbs? Parratt and I keep a book of them and the one who gets ten in one week wins. But she’s a great woman once you’ve got out of the mist.”

But Gillian never got out of the mist; not quite. It is true that the improbable connexion between her father (dead long ago of black-water fever in Burma) and Saint Paul, turned out, like the low-heeled shoes, to be proper to little Miss Battinson whose heels were very high and whose father was a well-known Dissenting Minister. And, little by little, she learnt to follow, with surprising success, the flying leaps taken by Mrs. Lysaght’s conversation from branch to branch of the Tree of Life, as she passed in and out of the great old Georgian house and across the spreading lawns, in which her famous school was lodged.

It was when the squirrel talk leapt—not only in the Tree of Life, but across the spaces which divide its branches from those of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that Gillian failed, and it was this failure which had brought her to the disaster she was now facing.

There was, Gillian had gathered this from the conversation in the Assistant Mistresses’ Room, one week in the year when Mrs. Lysaght deserted her post to make a pilgrimage. Colonel Lysaght was buried in Jersey, where he had died, and his death had synchronized with the dates not only of his own, but of his mother’s birthday as well. Old Lady Alice Lysaght, who had married at seventeen, was a woman of indomitable sentimentality, and, as her widowed daughter-in-law was her only surviving relative, the celebration of this triple anniversary on the spot where a comprehensive monument had been erected to it, was an event before which even the routine of Pelham House broke down.

In June, in the first week of June, Mrs. Lysaght always went to Jersey and left Miss Fairfax to rule in her stead. The one lesson a week which the head mistress gave in each form was distributed among the staff, and until you had occupied one of these forsaken posts during the annual retreat, you were not really established at Pelham House. It would generally take a new mistress eighteen months to attain what, in deference to the Colonel’s military shade, was called her majority, especially if, as Gillian had, she only joined the staff at the beginning of the summer term. But in Gillian’s case, the confirmation was swift and took place before she had been at Pelham House for more than six weeks.

“I _hope_ I’m doing right in telling you, Miss Armstrong,” poor Miss Winter had said, “but Mrs. Lysaght wishes you to take the Scripture Class in V.B. next week while she is away.”

“Me?” said Gillian, looking up from the French Composition she was correcting. “What book are they doing?”

Miss Winter consulted her sheaf of notes.

“Psalms,” she discovered; “but you are to do whatever you like. A single lesson is what Mrs. Lysaght always asks for. She prefers not to have her own treatment of the set-books interrupted. She thinks it might confuse the girls’ minds.” Miss Winter was incapable of disrespect and Gillian’s gurgle of delight died away in the long silence into which it travelled.

“I’ll do Naaman the Syrian,” she said. “It’s the finest short story in the world. I always want to send it in for one of those competitions.”

“You’ve got a horrid, secular mind, my girl,” said Miss Fairfax. “And you don’t seem to realize the signal honour bestowed on you.”

“No,” said Gillian, “it doesn’t seem very honourable—extra work. That’s why I chose Naaman. I know him by heart. Besides, it’s so well done.”

Miss Fairfax snorted.

“The mind of your principal is still a sealed book to you,” and she left the room without further argument.

On the following Tuesday, after Recreation, Gillian took V.B. through the finest short story in the world and felt her own enthusiasm merge in the collective excitement of the class as the drama turned on itself and worked back from healing to destruction in the great anticlimax:—

“Went not my heart with thee when the man turned again from his
chariot to meet thee?”

Miss Parratt, whose subject was History, and whose essential refinement was a quality attributed to her by Mrs. Lysaght on account of her fretful manner rather than in consequence of any real knowledge of her character, complained about it at luncheon:

“I took V.B. for the last lesson this morning, after you, Miss Armstrong. They were all quite excited. As though they’d been to the theatre.”

“Well, it was rather like that,” Gillian admitted; “it was bound to be. I got terribly excited myself.”

“It’s not at all the state I’m used to for that class,” said Miss Parratt.

“Do you think they _ought_ to be excited after a Scripture lesson?” asked little Miss Battinson, not without malice.

“Don’t be silly, Battinson,” said Miss Fairfax; “all Armstrong’s lessons are exciting. I can’t hear myself speak in the Shell when the Third Form’s singing French verbs at her next door. I’m going to bring it up at the next mistresses’ meeting.”

Gillian apologized.

“They do make a noise, I know. But it was the only way I could think of to keep them quiet.”

“I do see what you mean, though I don’t think you put it very accurately; however, that is only a passing problem. What I really should like to know is why Mrs. Lysaght gave you, of all people, V.B. for her Scripture hour. The confirmation class. It was mine by right. You’ve cut me out. You’re a thruster. I’m now in the outer darkness with Science and Physical Exercise. Praise God!” and Miss Fairfax helped herself to a great deal of rather weak mustard which ran down into the gravy on her plate.

Two days later, Mrs. Lysaght having returned to Pelham House, Miss Fairfax learned the truth.

“It seems,” she told Gillian, “that she was looking in on your Literature lesson one day and found the Fourth Form standing in serried ranks saying as one girl:

“‘And so the whole round world in every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.’

She says the deep devotional note you had so patiently got out of that particularly callous set—what’s the matter?”

“In the first place,” said Gillian, “how _do_ you understand all that from what she says?”

“I’m used to it. How _did_ you get the Fourth Form...?”

“But I was making them use their chest notes on all those o’s and ou’s, _whole_, _round_, _bound_, _gold_.”

“You’d chosen a particularly high-class sentiment.”

“Goodness!” Gillian was really alarmed. “But I’d just told them that the _meaning_ didn’t matter. I’d told them—oh, Miss Fairfax—but I’d told them—I felt they were young and must be told—that what the words said was just silly—an image of God like a convict with a weight chained to _both_ feet.... A God, a false image.”

“Well, I don’t know. It must be rather like hard labour—being responsible for the lot of us.”

“That isn’t how I think of God,” said Gillian; “and I don’t think it’s what Tennyson meant. He’d a silly mind. I was only using it as an exercise in vowel-sounds.”

“Bless the child! And it got her the confirmation class!”

“Anyhow they enjoyed it.”

“The vowel-sounds, or the confirmation class?”

“Both,” said Gillian and felt her cheeks burn again with the unfailing thrill of that tremendous tale.

“Well, it’s the aim of all you very modern people to make the children enjoy. I was brought up to teach them facts and make them sit up and work.” Miss Fairfax was fifty and made no bones about it. She belonged to a generation which kept Kindergarten methods well inside the Kindergarten. “I don’t coddle my classes,” had been her much-quoted observation, so ran the legend, when she made her first appearance at Pelham House. An undertone of the disapproving surprise and pain which such a statement must have caused her, always ran through any reference to Miss Fairfax when Mrs. Lysaght discussed her staff. And yet——

“Results, dear—scholarships—honours—even through the Universities. Classical tripos, every year since she has been with us.”

Gillian’s own education was a picaresque affair consisting of all her father had ever told her to read and a panoramic memory of class-rooms and lecture-theatres, art-galleries and concert-halls in Dresden, Munich, Vienna, Lausanne and Bournemouth through which she had followed her young, eager, inconsequent mother for six years after her father’s death. She envied Miss Fairfax the solid weight of Cheltenham and Girton, confirmed by a London degree. Professor Fairfax had not grudged the extra years necessary for this. He was not minded to leave his only daughter without the outward and visible recognition of those erudite inheritances of gifts and environment which she derived from him, and which, as he was given to telling people, had she been a man, would have made her a Fellow of All Souls.

Miss Fairfax, however, did not pity Gillian for her lack of these regularized advantages.

“Your state is the more gracious,” she said when Gillian told her that she had not the ghost of a degree, not the half of a certificate to her name. “You’ll not stay here. How, with a face like the National Gallery Botticelli and the mind of a revolutionary baby, you ever got here I still wonder.”

“I think,” said Gillian, “I must be cheap, and I do a great deal of work for the money.”

“How much?” said Miss Fairfax.

Gillian told her.

“The sweater!” said Miss Fairfax.

“But I get extra for French Conversation twice a week,” said Gillian.

“So does she,” said Miss Fairfax.

Miss Fairfax was right. Gillian was not staying. There had been a letter from a Parent. As a matter of fact there had been two, but the first was really Mrs. Lysaght’s own affair, though the complaint had been launched at Gillian by name.

But it was not only the letters. Gillian had begun to lose ground on the very day of Mrs. Lysaght’s return. The head mistress had come back from Jersey invigorated by the journey and by the sense of duty done, and not at all chastened by memories of those humiliations inseparable from a Channel passage which affect less-balanced frames.

It was in connexion with this immunity that Gillian had been made aware of an error in tact.

“And, I suppose, as usual, you were quite well throughout both crossings.”

This was poor Miss Winter saying the right thing at luncheon on the day of Mrs. Lysaght’s return.

“Yes, indeed,” said Mrs. Lysaght. “Never on the horizon and—semi-horizontal—— But Dean Webster, so deplorable—the clergy—and on deck.”

“Mrs. Lysaght always lies in a deck-chair lowered as much as possible and keeps her eyes off the horizon through the whole crossing,” Miss Winter explained.

“Oh, Mrs. Lysaght, if you stood up suddenly and caught sight of the horizon, would you be sick?” asked Gillian, elated by the thought of a new and useful light on a problem, in which for the moment she was keenly interested.

Mrs. Lysaght flushed a stormy red and bit her bottom lip. Miss Winter took off her thick eye-glasses for a moment, revealing the singular blackness all short-sighted people show when their eyes are uncovered, and Miss Fairfax drank half a tumblerful of water with rather more noise than anyone not supported by a Classical Tripos would be allowed to make without reproof in such company. The conversation at the other side of the table swooned into the silence that emanated from Mrs. Lysaght. Gradually and astonishingly Gillian knew that she was being isolated, put into a moral cell and that every mouthful she raised from her plate was now an infraction of some Code for the Guilty of which until that moment she had been unaware. It was clearly wrong to go on eating, and yet Gillian was conscious of the old childish sense of ostracism attached to the end of nursery dinner when you were left alone at table and everyone was forbidden to speak to you until you _had_ finished “every scrap of that good batter-pudding—and you eating all the raisins out of it first, you greedy little girl.”

It was batter-pudding again. And she had eaten all the raisins; not from conscious greed, but because they came that way, and, automatically, she was clearing her plate of the yellow residue, shovelling a path back to society again. And now _this_ was wrong. Mrs. Lysaght’s mist was no longer an amusing vapour with image after image looming through; it had thickened and dulled into a fog in which Gillian had lost her way. But the old compulsion prevailed. Bad little girls redeemed themselves and became good little girls by swallowing mouthfuls of cold, displeasing food in spite of stiff throats and mounting nausea; the way to salvation lay through physical anguish. By that old beacon she must steer across these unfamiliar waters. The unknown offence she had done must be mitigated by the known correctness. Gillian ate on. Around her spoons were laid down, forks mutely aligned with them, and the silence was augmented by this unanimous and simultaneous discarding of the tools of nutrition. But Gillian still ate with conscientious deliberation. One more spoonful and her plate would be cleared. As she pushed the yellow stickiness over the brim of the spoon, Gillian became aware of a pressure on her foot, slight but intentional. She looked up from her plate. Miss Fairfax was glaring at her.

“Put it down, you fool.” She caught the undertone and dropped her spoon with a clatter. All the plates but hers had been cleared away. The youngest mistress was keeping the whole High Table waiting.

Jessie, the waitress, was standing at Gillian’s elbow, and even as she whipped the plate away Mrs. Lysaght rose and pronounced an elaborate benediction on the meal her staff, with one exception, had only partially consumed.

“Gracious and most bountiful Father, we Thy most unworthy
servants render unto Thee thanksgiving and praise for these Thy
mercies vouchsafed so plenteously unto us alike both just and
unjust, and by us received in the name of and for the sake of Thy
dear Son our Lord. Amen.”

“I’ve never heard that grace before,” said Gillian to Miss Fairfax as the school filed out of the dining-hall.

“No,” said Miss Fairfax, “it’s the one used for criminals, and we’ve had very little crime this term, so far.”

“But whose crime was she denouncing?”

“Yours, my blue-eyed angel. Yours.”

“I felt I’d done _some_thing. Do you know what it was?”

“You asked Mrs. Lysaght at the top of your voice if she could be sea-sick—and at table. It isn’t done.”

“Well,” said Gillian, “my sister wouldn’t go to Mentone when she was ill in the winter because she’s always so horribly sick crossing the Channel, and I thought if keeping your eyes off the horizon really did——”

“You could have waited and asked the wretched Winter for details, and not suggested at the top of your voice that our august head could under any conditions whatever be sick in public. Didn’t you hear what she said about the Dean?”

“Not exactly—it was Miss Winter said—and I _do_ think the punishment severe.”

“That wasn’t the punishment, it was only the tocsin. Danger lies ahead.”

II

Miss Fairfax was right. The staff took coffee in Mrs. Lysaght’s private room and melted away to their afternoon work or leisure. Gillian, who had Middle School preparation from 2:15 to 4 that day, was just about to leave when Mrs. Lysaght laid a white, detaining hand on her wrist.

“A moment, dear. The hymn! So many hymn-books—Prayer should be elastic, spontaneous. I want it known by heart. On Friday. I shall give out this week’s hymn on Monday and each class will learn a verse each day. On Friday. _No_ hymn-books.”

“But, Mrs. Lysaght, some hymns have more than five verses.”

“That,” said Mrs. Lysaght with one of her astonishing lapses into clarity. “That will be your affair, dear. You will divide the hymn for me each week and repeat the day’s portion with the school in the Hall before Prayers.”

Gillian accepted her added burden and by the end of the week was enjoying the five minutes before Prayers, even though it took ten minutes off her breakfast-time to encompass the earlier arrival and the rounding up of stragglers for rehearsal. On Friday the school did her credit. Two hundred hymn-books made a black pyramid outside the Hall door and, when the note was struck, two hundred voices raised as one, sang in the clear cold tones of early youth the heated words:

My God how wonderful Thou art!
Thy Majesty how bright!
How radiant Thy mercy-seat
In depths of burning light!

In the second week, however, trouble came. Mrs. Lysaght, whose taste ran to sentiment, selected a fresh hymn, and the school did not take very kindly to it. There was trouble with the Fourth Form, headed by Madge Porter.

Madge Porter was not a pleasant child. She was always asking the kind of question which arises not from a desire for knowledge but out of a determination to put teachers in holes. She had completely routed Miss Parratt during a lesson on the Reformation by asking that unfortunate lady whether she believed in the Thirty-Nine Articles. Miss Parratt having given an emphatic assent, Madge Porter had told her she was wrong, as her father, who was in a position to know because he had taken a degree in Science, said they were nothing but a farrago of superstition, and please would Miss Parratt tell her what “farrago” meant.

And now Madge Porter was persuading the Middle School that this hymn-learning was extra-prep. So Gillian, on her own authority, took the ringleaders aside at Recreation on Wednesday and taught them their verses by rote. She sacrificed her own quarter of an hour to do it; but Madge Porter made her cross.

On Thursday morning Madge arrived at Prayers with a note for Mrs. Lysaght. It was from the parent who was in a position to know the truth about the Thirty-Nine Articles, and it ran:

DARWIN VILLA,
PUTNEY HILL,
_May 27th, 1912_.

DEAR MRS. LYSAGHT,

Kindly allow me to make a most emphatic protest against the
unwholesome restraint and unpedagogic waste of time at present
imposed on my young daughter Madge, by one of your junior
mistresses called, I understand, Miss Armstrong.

It appears that this Miss Armstrong has curtailed my daughter’s
recreation and interfered with the consumption of half a pint of
milk at 11 o’clock ordered by my doctor for her, by keeping her
in to commit to memory some highly reprehensible lines.

My daughter has been obliged to burden her mind with such an
incitement to laziness and lack of initiative as this:

O could we but relinquish all
Our earthly props and simply fall
On Thine almighty arms.

I make no complaint of the inculcation of Christian doctrine
which I am aware is inseparable from the curriculum of your
school, as I have taken due precaution to fortify Madge’s mind
against superstition by my own home teaching. But I do strongly
protest against the insidious inertia advocated in the passage I
have quoted and also against Miss Armstrong’s tyranny, and must
beg that Madge be removed from the classes in which she teaches.

Yours sincerely,
JAMES PORTER, B.SC.

P.S. I shall be glad if, for the future, Madge may be excused
from Prayers.

Mrs. Lysaght gave Gillian the letter to read.

“Most unwise—most unwise,” she murmured and bit her lip as she waited for Gillian’s comment.

“What a bad old man,” said Gillian. “No wonder Madge is such a terror.”

Mrs. Lysaght blushed. She always blushed when you said the wrong thing.

“Mr. Porter is a _parent_,” she said with heat; “a _parent_—he has every right—and the milk—never forget the means of health.”

“But—you said ...” began Gillian.

Mrs. Lysaght waved her hand, the hand with the gold pencil in it.

“That has nothing to do with the question. Madge Porter does not take Scripture. You may go now, dear, but do not let it occur again.”

Madge Porter’s rebellion blew over, but “It” occurred again. It, as Miss Fairfax explained when Gillian had exhausted herself in wondering what she was expected to avoid, being a letter from a parent.

“You should never let it come to letters,” said Miss Fairfax. “A good assistant mistress consumes her own rows.”

“That’s what I was trying to do,” Gillian protested, “and even if I’d known that Mr. Porter was such a bigoted free-thinker, I don’t feel that I should have let Madge off. I don’t like this hymn business myself, but if I’m to do it it shall be done properly.”

“It won’t last,” Miss Fairfax promised her; “it’s your punishment for that impertinence of yours at luncheon last week. You’ll be let off if you’re properly good.”

The difficulty, however, was to be properly good in a world where all the values were so different from her own.

III

Gillian sat in the class-room after Mrs. Lysaght had left her. The three windows were wide open and the voices of the girls playing tennis in the courts beyond the lawn came up to her as they cried the score. It was after five o’clock and in half an hour the school-house would be closed. Already the sunlight was thrusting golden swords between the flat branches of the cedar-tree that darkened the window until evening, and the scent of the tobacco plants outside the Sixth Form Room was beginning to creep into the air which came in from the garden. And still she sat in the little chair on the teacher’s platform, her arms lying across the desk in front of her, her hands, smooth and beautiful and strange like the hands of some other woman, some woman whom she loved.

In her lap she held a fat, blue leather manuscript book with double brass clasps, the book her father had given her on her ninth birthday into which she had copied prose and verse when she found it worthy, from the books she could not afford to buy. It lay in the green gingham valley of her dress, between her knees, and she had covered it with three rather fatigued roses and a bunch of pansies with black cotton round their brittle juicy stalks, the offerings of two of the class that afternoon. The pansies came from little Gertie Wentworth, a pink-faced, rather solemn child who made it her business to see that all the mistresses were supplied with flowers in turn, and who suited her offerings to the age and status of the recipient in a spirit of calculating frankness. The week usually opened or closed with fruit from the Wentworth hot-houses for Mrs. Lysaght. Miss Fairfax and Miss Parratt had hot-house flowers; so did Mademoiselle de Vanges, who had a tiny crown embroidered on her handkerchiefs. But, for Miss Winter and Miss Battinson, Gertie went into the open air and Fräulein Kühn had made a really dreadful scene on the morning on which the well-meaning Gertie brought her broad beans done up in brown paper. Pinks and lavender from the kitchen-garden borders, marsh-marigolds and scentless cabbage-roses did for Gillian; but they came more often than the nobler flowers, and Gertie, who had no veils over her heart, explained that she got them herself, the other flowers being her regular allowance for purposes of ingratiation ordered by her mother and supplied by the gardeners. In justice to Mrs. Wentworth it must be admitted that she had no idea of the scaling to which her daughter subjected the carrying out of her original half-shrewd half-kindly arrangement.

“You see, Mrs. Armstrong,” said Gertie, apologizing for the pinks, “you are new and I only get one bunch a day from Jennings. So I went into the kitchen garden and got these myself as I always give the irises to Miss Battinson and Jennings sent irises this morning.”

Gillian was so enchanted at this glimpse of a really ordered mind, as well as being glad to have the fragrant pinks, that she forebore to pick out Gertie’s “only” and replace it next the subject of this sentence as a good school-mistress is bound in duty to do. But she went about with a little grit in the wheels of her conscience for the rest of the day. “Why should I correct her grammar out of class?” she kept asking herself. “When she took all that trouble to be kind to me with flowers suitable to my station? I hope she’ll marry the Lord Mayor of London when she grows up, so as not to waste her instinct for suiting the gift to the taker.”

So Gertie’s pansies lay like a funeral wreath on the cover of Gillian’s commonplace book, and beside them, Jane Bird’s roses.

Jane Bird was one of Gillian’s problems. Jane Bird was really the only problem of which Gillian had been consciously aware at Pelham House. The intricacies of Mrs. Lysaght’s mind and conversation always presented themselves to her most junior mistress as amusements—labyrinths and jig-saws in which you wandered or which you took away with you to work out when you had time. But Jane Bird was a different, a rather frightening problem. She was also the only figure which stood out with any real distinction from the confused crowd of girls, mistresses, servants and visiting professors who surged on the attention of the dazed new-comer at Pelham House.

She was a tall, gaunt Sixth Form girl with a high colour and steel-black hair parted in the middle and twisted into hard round knobs over each ear, and she made her one-piece frocks herself, usually out of bright blue casement cloth. She wore round-glassed spectacles and no stays and was known to the Middle School as the Dutch Doll. To her coevals and to the staff she was “Bird” without a Christian name, the only girl in the school to be distinguished in that particular way. There were two legends about her: one that she bathed naked in the sea in Cornwall every summer; the other, that she had killed a young man who had called her “Jinny” a third time, and had buried the remains in Richmond Park at midnight.

Bird was known to take pride in both these legends and had illustrated them in a series of spirited drawings accompanied by a ballad. This work filled one of the Pelham House note-books, the red-covered kind issued from the Stationery Room for Greek and Latin only, and nobody quite knew how Bird came to possess it. Miss Fairfax, who had discovered its existence when correcting Latin Proses, always declared that Bird had stolen it and was daring the staff to denounce her to Mrs. Lysaght for theft. But nobody denounced Bird, and even if anybody had, it is more than likely that Miss Winter, who had charge of the Stationery Room, would have suffered alone. For, there was no doubt about it, the wretch was a marvel. “She drinks-in Greek like a sponge,” said Miss Fairfax, who was coaching her for Responsions much to the disgust of Mr. Reppington the Art Master who had never in all his experience had such a gift for drawing as Bird’s to develop. Bird’s name had headed every examination list in every subject as she passed up the school from the Lower Fourth Form, which she had entered at the age of twelve, positively smothered in scholarships; and it was to Jane Bird that Mrs. Lysaght looked during the next decade for the greatest glories ever earned for Pelham House.

Until mid-term Gillian had only known this star of the Upper School by sight. But one rainy morning at Middle School Recreation Bird, being Chief Monitor, descended upon an over-noisy game in the Hall, and rescued Gillian from her single-handed combat against the forces of disorder by playing dance-music on the piano until the restless children were all waltzing happily together.

“D’y recognize the tune?” said Bird over her shoulder to Gillian, who had gone up to the platform steps to thank her.

“No,” said Gillian, “but it’s a very good waltz.”

“It’s this week’s hymn,” said Bird. “_The day Thou gavest_, three-four time. _The two-three—Thou two-three, O Lor-three—is enDED._ Go and dance with Molly Carpenter—she’s perishing with love and lack of exercise. _To Thee-ee our mor-or-ning Son-ongs a-scend-ded_—You’ll enjoy it.”

And Gillian had gone meekly up to the other monitor, a sickly girl in the Upper Fifth who used to waylay her in the mornings as she walked across the Heath from the 22-omnibus, and had danced with her till the bell for Fourth Lesson rang.

Margaret Carpenter knew all about the origin of the swinging waltz.

“She made a ripping two-step out of _Hark! the Herald Angels_, but Mrs. Lysaght won’t allow anything but waltzing in the school,” she complained to Gillian when the dance was over, “and Bird’s never played any of them at Recreation before.”

Two days later the door of the class-room opened, ten minutes after Gillian had settled down to the afternoon French Conversation class by means of which she brought her salary up to a living wage, and in walked Bird.

“Mrs. Lysaght has given me permission to change from Mademoiselle’s Senior French Conversation to yours, Miss Armstrong,” she explained in a loud, clear voice. “It is felt that one Englishwoman will be more ready to appreciate and to assist another Englishwoman in her difficulties with a foreign tongue than anyone to whom these difficulties are by nature non-existent.”

She recited this speech in the manner of one having learnt the whole of it by heart, and then stalked down the class-room, only half-filled by the girls who took this extra subject, and settled herself in a desk by the window at the farther end of the room.

Gillian’s oddly excited alarm at this apparition was not diminished when it became evident that Jane Bird was taking no active part in the conversation class. To all remarks addressed to her by name she replied with the same phrase delivered in a strong Britannic accent:

“Mais-oui, mademoiselle, vous avez raison,” and then fell back into a concentrated silence so removed from inattention that it baffled Gillian as Bird clearly intended it to do.

At her second appearance she took copious notes, and once questioned the construction of a line Gillian quoted; at her third she remained silent and intent on some drawing before her. When the class was dismissed Gillian had, her heart beating with fright, asked the Chief Monitor to remain behind. Bird, calm and still speechless, stood to attention, facing the light so that its reflection in her thick glasses completely hid her eyes from her terrified interlocutor.

“I want to know,” said Gillian, her tongue thickening in her mouth as she spoke. “I want to know why you come to this class.”

“But, Miss Armstrong,” Bird’s voice was silky with polite surprise, “to learn to speak French.”

“But you never speak.”

“I listen to you. That helps me enough.”

Gillian changed her line.

“What have you been drawing all this afternoon?”

“Lit-tel Armstrongs,” said Bird, “dee-licious little Armstrongs backwards through the centuries. Some of them better than others. Look,” and she placed her sketch-book on the desk before Gillian. “Eighteen-eighty, bustle and fringe, Du Maurier—_not_ very good—but Cranford and a crinoline—delightful. First Empire—a failure—Elizabeth—too stiff and concealing. Medieval henna and veil much better. I shall do you Greek next week—and Egyptian—I’m strong on Egypt—and then—Eve in the Garden—oh, only the head and shoulders——”

“How dare you?” said Gillian, breathless.

“But they’re _very_ clever,” said Bird. “Of course, if you object, you can report me to Mrs. Lysaght. You can’t very well report me to myself, though if you’d like to do that—I—as Chief Monitor will naturally come to your aid—I am bound by the beautiful Pelham House Code of Honour to do so.”

“Very well then,” said Gillian, “I _do_ report you to yourself. Go home now and bring yourself to me at Second Recreation to-morrow in the Third Form Room, and tell me what you’re going to do about it.”

The next day at Second Recreation Gillian had found Jane Bird waiting for her in the empty class-room.

“Well,” said Gillian.

“I’ve thought over the case you reported to me yesterday, Miss Armstrong,” said Bird coldly, “and I have not only confiscated the drawings you complain of, but destroyed them.”

“Destroyed the drawings,” Gillian gasped.

“By fire. They _were_ very clever. I hope you are satisfied.” And with enormous dignity to which she contrived to add a touch of pathos as of some wounded giant, Bird had stalked away.

She continued to come to French Conversation and Gillian grew to dread her speech more than her silence. For Bird now came armed with questions so subtly framed, so intelligently asked, that it was impossible to convict the questioner of any object in asking them other than the entirely laudable determination to make the best of her opportunities; and so searching, that, more than once, Gillian was obliged to confess her inability to deal with one or another of them.

Then, to her own great relief and pleasure, Gillian found that Bird was as keenly eager for the beauty of words as she was herself, and on the last afternoon but one before the Midsummer Examination set in, she had had what she called a miracle hour—one of those moments when Beauty slips away from all the obscuring considerations which hide her from busy people and they pause from their blinding pursuits while the vision is granted. It was part of the puzzle that she could sometimes take a class with her into the revelation—but not always. That day they had come—all of them—but it was Bird, Jane Bird, who had been filled with the glory, who had pursued each lovely line with Gillian, who had from her own reading, caught gleaming syllables herself and had added them to the jewelled minutes of that shared excitement.

And it was out of this glow, this splendour, that the thunderbolt had fallen!

The second French Conversation class in the week was held on Friday afternoon, and for it Gillian, still in the haze of heavenly sounds which had enclosed her consciousness ever since the Tuesday class, had brought with her the fat, blue commonplace book, because, after the flowing of verse she had been constrained to hear the march of prose, and there were passages copied out there which she must let forth to fill the channels freshly made in the minds of the girls she taught, and most of all (she knew this with a deep satisfaction) in Jane Bird’s mind, by the poetry she had made them all hear.

All the morning long she had gone about her other duties waiting until the hour when, in the class-room overlooking the lawn, in the shade of the great cedar-tree outside, she could take her own class—and oh! most specially Jane Bird—back into the enchanted country. _Mon âme est un colombier_, how the molten phrases flowed!—_Presse le pas, ô mon rêve_—she could hear the quickened breathing, see the flush which burned her own cheeks flame in the faces before her, as the spirit quickened within each one of them.

And it had been almost as good to do as to dream of, this sharing of her private hoard. As she read the passages aloud, the voice, the level, grave and beautiful voice of her father reading them to her in the larch-woods above Sils-Maria, seemed to be leading her own. She could see his small, fine features, his soft, blue, very clear eyes, his thin hands, holding the yellow-paper book, the great length of him, six long feet and more, stretched in the grass, almost on the edge of the rock above the lake. The breeze seemed to sigh around them again with faint icy breath from the glaciers behind; and all the light and colour and love of that last summer before he died gathered and increased in her as she read, and drove through her, and reached the listening girls.

When the singing phrases were finished, Gillian looked across the wide room to Jane Bird sitting erect and motionless at the far end of the aisle of desks. And Jane Bird’s eyes were welling over with great glistening tears which ran down her flat, red cheek and fell on the flat, blue bosom of her home-made frock, unheeded.

Bird, the arrogant, contemptuous, terrible Bird was crying! Gillian looked at the roses on her desk with changed eyes. When Bird, following Gertie Wentworth with her pansies, had laid the three heavy Frau Karl Droushkys across the pen-tray on the reading-desk as the rest of the class took their seats, Gillian had hardly been able to thank the girl for them. Her action had been abrupt, slightly mocking. She suggested more than so simple a gift need imply.

“They’re like pale girls with red rims to their eyes,” she’d said, and Gillian had felt caricatured. But the faint resentment Bird had aroused was gone now, washed away by those heavy, silent tears.

And then, suddenly, the whole class had risen to its feet. Mrs. Lysaght was in the room. How long she had been there Gillian did not know. The door had been left open because of the heat.

“Who is the author?” Mrs. Lysaght was flustered, displeased.

“Théophile Gautier,” said Gillian. “It’s a famous passage from _Mademoiselle de Maupin_.”

“Go!” Mrs. Lysaght had dismissed the class, but Gillian had remained reading the letter the head mistress had thrust into her hand. It was from the Bishop of Putney whose twin daughters were salient features of the Upper Fifth and of Gillian’s conversation class.

MY DEAR MRS. LYSAGHT,

Doris and Daphne have come home in a great state of enthusiasm
from their French lesson this afternoon, and have somewhat
gravely disturbed their mother by assuring her that the most
beautiful line in French poetry is one taken from Racine’s
_Phèdre_. It runs thus:

“La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë.”

They have been asking me to elucidate the text. While agreeing
with the young lady who has evidently stimulated my daughter’s
appreciation of verbal beauty, may I venture, quite tentatively,
to suggest that it would be wiser in future to seek examples in
the works of Corneille, or if Racine be more fertile in melodious
passages (I am myself a little rusty in these matters), to select
passages from _Esther_ or from _Athalie_ rather than from those
plays which are not usually read in English schools.

Please do not allow this mild suggestion to assume an unduly
critical weight in your consideration and above all, dear lady,
do not for one moment accuse me of wishing to interfere with the
more than admirable conduct of your own high mission at Pelham
House.

Yours, always most cordially,
VINCENT PUNCTUS.

“But,” said Gillian, “Corneille doesn’t——”

“Out of the question,” said Mrs. Lysaght. She was quivering with passion and the lace which fell from the wrists of her grey silk-muslin gown shook about her hands as she gesticulated between each fragment of a phrase.

“Gross indecency—corruption—and now Gautier—nothing but his verse—selections of course—_Perles de la Poésie Française_—in the Library—I must see what else——” and she took the manuscript book from the reading-stand.

“Oh, but Mrs. Lysaght,” protested Gillian, “nobody ever—not even my mother—it’s quite a private book——”

“Anatole France—_Le Lys Rouge_—monstrous—Gabriele d’Annunzio—steeped in vice—Swinburne—Rossetti—The Ballad of Hell—my dear Miss Armstrong—how mistaken—Hugo von Hofmannsthal—unknown to me—Maeterlinck—_Serres Chaudes_—but this is nauseating—a contamination—confiscate——”

“Give me back my book,” said Gillian, “you are not fit to look at it. It is full of loveliness you’ll never see.”

“I have been completely deceived in you,” said Mrs. Lysaght, “completely. This one term of probation will end at the end of this month. I must ask you to set and correct your own examination papers in the office—not mix with the school again.” And with this lapse into lucidity, Mrs. Lysaght trembled out of the room, carrying the Bishop’s letter reverently folded in her right hand, the left being crammed as usual with note-book, pencil and a floating supplement of extra documents which varied in number and intensity with the time of term.

Mrs. Lysaght’s crash into Gillian’s paradisic hour seemed like a thunderclap in a sunlit garden. It shattered the peace, but only for a moment. As she sat on, a little stunned by the force of the anger which had been spent upon her, the waves of beauty began to creep up once more—the flood of sound to rise in her ears again, drowning the sense of disaster which had only partially reached her comprehension through the violence of its onset.

Then another presence made itself vehement. Rigid against the panelled wall at the back of the room Jane Bird sat, black and white, crimson and royal blue, hardened again behind her convex glasses as though she never had, never could have wept.

“Jane, Jane Bird—how did you get there?”

“I didn’t go.”

“But—Mrs. Lysaght——”

“I know. Neither of you saw me. It’s a trick.”

“Do you mean you’ve been there all the time?”

“All the time. Yes. It’s been a great help to me. I shan’t be going to Oxford after all.”

“Why not?”

“Well, you won’t be here to coach me in French for one thing. I shan’t tell you the other.”

“Oh, very well.” Gillian began to gather her books and flowers together standing up rather wearily to do so. Jane was beside her, below the platform, looking up at her with yellow eyes out of the deep lenses of her spectacles.

“The matter with you is that you don’t see face values,” said the Chief Monitor. “You won’t in the least know what this would mean to anyone else. For you it’ll just be new words I’ve written to an old tune. As you told me to,” and she placed on the desk a sheet of thin blue paper on which in her clear, delicate writing, she had set down some verses.

“Good afternoon, Miss Armstrong,” said Jane Bird, and walked out of the room.

Gillian picked up the paper she had left behind her.

AN OLD SONG RESUNG—she read—

If every tree and every flower
And every star of night
Could join their beauties for an hour
To make one pure delight;

The grace thus formed would cease to be
To nature’s marvel true,
Would lack the mystic unity
For which I worship you.

“I suppose it’s _Songs of Araby_,” said Gillian, humming the lines through after a second reading, “and you repeat the last two lines. Not at all bad, but it isn’t really a lyric,” and she slipped the sheet of paper into her commonplace book and snapped the clasps upon it.

Downstairs in the cloak-room she was confronted by Miss Fairfax.

“Will nothing wake you from your dream?” said she. “I’ve watched you coming along the gallery and down the stairs, looking as though you’d been in Heaven.”

“So I have,” said Gillian, “but I believe I’ve been excommunicated all the same.”

“That’s what I mean. Mrs. Lysaght came rushing by as I came out of the Extra Matriculation Coaching half an hour ago and said something about the Bishop and the French tongue. What have you been telling the twins?”

“Only about vowel-sounds,” said Gillian.

“What? Again? And not lucky this time.”

Gillian explained.

“Well, all I can say,” said Miss Fairfax, when the facts were before her, “is that I wonder, with your genius for missing the real point of a quotation, all I wonder is that you didn’t administer ‘_Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée_’ to the whole class. It’s quite as good in its way.”

“No, it’s not,” said Gillian, “it’s all t’s and hissing and it’s like ‘our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal silence.’ She told the school that was the finest line in Wordsworth the other day, and it’s two lines, and it’s horrid, and she might just as well have said, ‘though inland far we be’ or ‘old forgotten far-off things’ or ‘I feel the weight of chance desires.’” And much to Miss Fairfax’s distress, Gillian sat down on the boot-rack and began to cry.

“If these tears,” said Miss Fairfax, “are shed for the æsthetic misdirections of our Head, they are wasted; if they bedew the close of your own career as an instructress of youth they are silly, because,” Miss Fairfax sat down beside her young colleague and blew her nose with decision, “because you have not the kind of outlook which fits you for the career of instructress.”

“Don’t say ‘instructress,’ dear, darling Miss Fairfax,” said Gillian, “I can’t bear it.”

IV

And now she was going home to tell Lilac. She had walked down West Hill and taken the tram to Clapham Junction so as to go the longest way round and have the bit across the Bridge before she went in. It would be seven o’clock before she got to the river, and the tide would be full. Over in the rose-and-lavender distance the flattened bubble of the Lambeth gas-vat, like some pearly white moon would be rising from the stuff of the Earth ready to detach itself to soar up, up, into the highways where satellites travel the sky. The window-boxes and painted tubs along Cheyne Walk would make a bright mosaic against the shadow beneath the sunset, and all the sparrows in the garden in Chancery would be chirruping over their evening crumbs. And Lilac would be laying the table for supper and wondering why Gillian was late. Gillian was not at all sure how Lilac would take the news.

Lilac took it very well. She had finished laying the table when Gillian got in and was sewing two enormous mauve satin ribbons on to a white crinoline hat.

“I’ve washed them,” she said as Gillian opened the door which led straight off the top-floor landing into their little sitting-room. “I’ve washed them in cold water with salt in it, and they’re as good as new. Sophie does get the best of everything.”

“Was it one of Sophie’s hats?” asked Gillian.

“No. I bought the hat myself, but the strings come off that orchid-mauve frock Sophie gave me at Easter and the rose was in a hat of hers. I’ve put them all together and they’re exactly like a model I saw in Sloane Street last week.”

“Lilac,” said Gillian, “I’ve been excommunicated. Mrs. Lysaght and the Bishop have turned me out of Pelham House.”

“The beetles!” said Lilac. “The black beetles!—the cockroaches! And you’ve worked for them like a steam-engine. Go and get into your white muslin and we’ll have _all_ the butter with the green peas. I’ve put an onion and some mint to boil with them as you told me.”

Friday was the night the Armstrongs cooked their own supper on a Primus. On other evenings they had what was called the House dinner sent up from the Club kitchen.

Over the late strawberries which followed the green peas (not that the Armstrongs were vegetarians, but you can’t cook meat on a Primus in the scullery), Lilac pronounced herself on Mrs. Lysaght’s side.

“It’s a mercy,” said Lilac severely, “that I kept _The Garden of Karma_ locked up in my side of the wardrobe or you’d have given them ‘Pale hands I love’ for daily bread.”

“No, I shouldn’t. It’s slip-slop.”

“It’s luscious,” said Lilac; “besides, how do you know, when I haven’t let you read it?”

“I read it in Brussels last year when I was staying with Henriette,” said Gillian. “I wouldn’t give it to a railway porter.”

“Well, a railway porter wouldn’t want a book of poetry,” said Lilac with that sententious, definitive air which characterized the close of most of her arguments with her elder sister.

* * * * *

That night, long after Gillian had supposed her to be asleep, Lilac called out in a soft little voice across the room from the bed under the window:

“Jilly dear,” she said, “what _are_ you going to do?”

“Pray,” said Gillian; “it’s the only thing I can do to-night.”

“I suppose it is,” said Lilac. “I’ll say a threefold Ah-ah-men for you.”

“Thank you, Laylock. I didn’t know you were awake——”

“Oh, I just woke up. I suppose you were praying something fierce, and that always disturbs me.”

“Sorry,” said Gillian.

“Granted, Miss Armstrong, I’m sure,” said Lilac.

And then they both fell asleep.