South Riding (42 page)

“Well, my dear,” she said. “Forgive me—Miss Burton, I mean. But, of course, I am older than you, and, as you say, a bit motherly, perhaps, if not always very clever and I dare say you’re right. You often are, you know. And it’s been a very tiring term. I’ll try to remember about poor Miss Jameson. I ought to have thought of all that for myself. You’ve done me good, you know.”

Smiling and pacified, Miss Parsons then withdrew.

But Sarah sat staring at her ink-stained fingers. “You’ve done me good,” she repeated—the satisfaction of the dominating, who draw nourishment from other people’s troubles. The poor have we always with us.

She never disliked herself more than when she had poured the oil of flattery on the school’s troubled waters.

Yet was it flattery? Wasn’t it only truth? Had she not dealt with the two women justly—to say nothing about the bewildered new young serving-maid, wrapping towels round pillow-cases, or pillow-cases round towels. Oh, what
did
it matter?

What then did matter?

These rumours of Hitler’s Nazi movement in Germany? There swam before her tired mind the memory of that summer holiday in the Black Forest, of tables outside a vine-wreathed inn, and Ernst, lean, brown and eager, in the khaki shirt and shorts worn by hundreds of young Communists— drinking her health in beer after a long strenuous walk. Ernst, who wanted peace and comradeship and a mystical unity of like-minded youth—Ernst whose mother had been a Jewess . . . Ernst, who had disappeared, and who had, some said, been beaten to death at the Dachau concentration camp. These things happened to one’s friends. They were important. It was important that two years ago Sarah had attended a meeting of German teachers and professional women, serious, dogmatic, experienced—decent women, sincere in their intentions. And to-day? Where were they? Under what sad compromises were their bright hopes buried? By what specious arguments did they defend their present standards?

She thought of her own dreams for the world. In her desk lay notes, neatly clipped and arranged in coloured folders, of her talks on current affairs—The growth of world unity—The task of an International Labour Organisation—The League grows up—Disarmament. Beyond her personal troubles lay the deep fatigue of one whose impersonal hopes do not march with history.

Am I doing any good here? she asked herself, seeing all that was imperfect in her school, her failures in diplomacy, her impatience with the governors, her betrayal of Lydia Holly. She ought somehow to have found a way to keep that girl at school. She ought to have saved Miss Sigglesthwaite’s dignity. She ought . . .

Running a staff, she thought, was like controlling an experimental factory for high explosives. At any moment the stuff might go off from quite unexpected causes. No permanent peace was possible.

But did she want peace?

Miss Parsons’ humble dream of tranquillity was not hers. She was not humble at all. She had unlimited confidence in her own ability.

Yet, if so, why was she here, coping with a matron’s grievances about towels, or a governor’s eccentricity over grocers’ contracts? Surely her place was out in the big world fighting for those principles in which she so deeply believed.

She searched her heart. This is my school. I do what I like wth my own.

Her mouth set in a thin line. She drew note-paper towards her. She returned to her interminable letter-writing to Mrs. Rossiter about Laura’s quarantine, to Mrs. Twiggs, a prospective parent, arranging an appointment, to Colonel Collier about the playing-field—twenty-three letters.

At half-past six she put her letters on the post tray, filled her case with senior history examination papers to be corrected, put on her hat and closed her office for the day.

It was a perfect July evening. The little town swam in warm liquid light. From the height of North Cliff Sarah could look down upon the uneven roofs of grey slate and red tiling, the bare forest of wireless posts, strung with a fine cobweb of aerials, the motley crowd along the esplanade, the wide stretch of the sands. The formlessness and disorder of the place attracted her. It was raw material. She wanted to make use of it—she was not afraid of hard work or responsibility or isolation, but she feared futility and failure. She feared the waste of her ability and vigour on ill-judged enterprise. Am I a fool? she asked herself. Is it worth while?

On the pale flattened sea a fishing boat, a mile or more away, trailed its widening spearhead of ripples across the surface. If I could sail in one of these, thought Sarah. Her head ached. The heavy case of papers to be corrected dragged at her arm.

She let herself into her house, where still three measles cases were accommodated in her first-floor bedrooms. She sat down to an hour’s work at her papers. At eight o’clock she and the nurse ate a cold supper together. Later, she climbed up to the attic where she had slept during the measles epidemic.

She liked the attic. Its dormer window faced westward across the outskirts of the town to the fields beyond, where already a group of tents had been pitched by holiday-makers. Sometimes at night Sarah looked out and saw them glowing like convolvulus flowers lit from within, lying mouth downward on the darkening field. Once she had heard music. Sometimes laughter. These sights and sounds gave her great pleasure. Music and lantern light and laughter seemed to her proper accompaniments for youth in summer-time.

But this evening, being mid-week, the camp was deserted —no laughing boys dragged out their mattresses to air on the sun-baked turf, no girls tossed paraffin recklessly on to smoking fires. The sun dipped below the flat horizon. From the houses pin-points of light appeared. Now on the allotment an old man called his hens. Now the revolving lamp from the lighthouse trailed its pale wand of light across the landscape. Now the lights of a car swept down the Hardrascliffe Road and disappeared. Now from the stile at its western end two figures, a boy’s and a girl’s, entered the campers’ field.

Sarah watched them idly, her elbows on her window-sill, her pointed chin propped on her hands, the cool breeze fanning her aching head.

The boy and the girl did not cross the field directly; they kept to the shadow of the hedge, moving furtively. When they came to the point opposite to the tents, the boy went forward. Sarah could hear his low unanswered whistle. He approached a tent and, kneeling, undid the flaps and threw them open. Then he went round the enclosure, peering into all the others. No one was there. The camp was empty. He beckoned to the girl.

Sarah watched her move across towards him, slowly, as though reluctant yet drawn by an irresistible attraction.

She knew quite well what drama of youth and folly and love she was observing. Those children thought that nobody could see them.

The boy vanished inside the tent, the girl stood outside. Her dark figure was outlined against the dun grey canvas. With a queer little gesture of defiance, she pulled off her beret, and Sarah could see how she tossed the thick fair hair that hung about her shoulders and turned her head slowly, from south to north, surveying the town as though taking leave of her familiar childhood.

She waited so long that the boy came out again to her. In the growing twilight their figures remained separate, and to Sarah flashed the thought: She’s going to fail him. She’s going to run away at the last moment; and, without criticising the wisdom of her foreboding, she felt she could not bear it for him—if the girl should fail him now.

But the boy put out both hands, and the girl took them, and he drew her in after him to the open tent and closed the flaps behind them, and soon tent and field alike dissolved in darkness.

Sarah stood entranced, until her lulled reason reasserted itself. “What have I done?” she asked; “perhaps that’s one of my girls.” It was too late to run out of her house now, to follow the two and interrupt that childish and potentially tragic honeymoon. The lovers were lovers now, and no long arm of discipline, morality or wisdom could undo what they had done together.

But what astonished Sarah was not her acquiescence, nor her recollection of the brief pain that pierced her when, for an instant, she had thought that the girl was going to run away, it was the realisation that when the boy had held his hands out, her imagination had seen in the dusk hands held out to her also; her ears had heard a whispered invitation, and her dreaming mind had devised the vision of a face smiling up at her ardently from the shadows. And the face and the voice and the hands were those of her antagonist, the governor, the councillor, the father of Midge, Robert Carne of Maythorpe.

“I love him!” she cried aloud, as though struck by sudden anguish. Immediately she felt that she understood everything. All her past slid into an inevitable and discernible pattern; all her future lay before her, doomed to inevitable pain.

She knew love; she knew its aspect, its substance and its power. She knew that she faced no possible hope, no promise, no relief.

She moved from the window and switched on the light as though the bold realism of electricity might dispel that revelation. But the small white room with its sloping roof, its painted chest, its narrow virginal bed, only imprisoned her all the more closely in her knowledge.

She turned off the light and went downstairs slowly to her sitting-room. Setting out her work she began again to correct examination papers. But her hand trembled so that she could hardly hold her pencil, and every now and again she looked about her, as though to reassure herself that all this was a bad dream. But there was no escape.

She was caught, trapped in emotion, torn by fear and pity, by anger because he was her enemy, by sorrow, by desire. She had thought that she could live safely in impersonal action, forgetful of herself, concerned only with the children and their future, with the building of a new world for them, with the fulfilment of a large impersonal hope.

But she had been dragged back to consciousness of herself. A school teacher of forty—plain, red-haired, with large bony hands and light short eyelashes, a little common. The knowledge of her physical defects scorched her. Humiliation, for all her grand ideas of noble unselfconsciousness, consumed her. Because she loved and desired to be loved, she exposed herself to vanity. She became vulnerable, afraid, disarmed before a hostile world.

“Oh, no,” she cried to her heart. “Oh, no, no, no!”

But the silent room, the books, the reflection of her pale distraught face in the small gilt mirror, answered—Yes.

“I
DON’T
like it. Great girls. All ages. Naked up to the thigh. No. I’m surprised at you allowing it. I am indeed, Huggins.”

Mr. Drew put his foot down.

Huggins had been a bit surprised too, though he should have known what he was in for that day when he called upon the Hubbards.

“After all,” he said weakly. “It’s for a good cause. The hospital’s charity. Christian charity. And then it’s not as if I’d known what they would wear.”

“It’s what they
don’t
wear,” Mr. Drew corrected him.

As an estate agent Arthur Thomas Drew did business round about Kiplington in a small way, but he did moral censorship in quite a large one. He was on the Kiplington Watch Committee, and he watched indeed. It was he who, hearing complaints about the ethical tone of the penny-in-the-slot machines along the esplanade, had instituted an
ad hoc
committee for their inspection. Thus it happened that a band of four men and a woman—Alderman Mrs. Beddows— one Sunday afternoon when the esplanade was closed to the public, marched solemnly from one machine to the other, dropping in their pennies, listened to the tinkle, click and whirr as the machine was set in motion, and thoughtfully examined the revolving picture sequences, which had been advertised by such seductive titles as
Through Winnie’s Window
and
What the Butler Winked At.

“All very disappointing,” confessed Mrs. Beddows later. “Nothing more than one or two women in boned corsets, a fat man in a night shirt, and a couple of chamber pots. If that’s the kind of thing that amuses the gentlemen, I should say they were welcome to their little pleasures, poor dear things.”

Mr. Drew had not agreed. The machines were duly banished, and their critic turned his attention to the Public Libraries. In his mind a librarian’s duty was mainly that of moral censor. Repeatedly he called the harassed Mr. Prizethorp’s attention to volumes which he found “stinking with sex.” “Public incinerator’s proper place for them,” he would say of all modern novels. His daughters sometimes wondered where he had acquired a knowledge of literature so extensive that he could pass wholesale judgment on it. According to Mr. Drew, Aldous Huxley was a “disgusting pervert,” Virginia Woolf a “morbid degenerate,” and Naomi Mitchison “not fit for a lunatic asylum.” “No, I’ve not read it all through, but I know
enough
,” was his favourite condemnation.

Therefore the classical carnival organised by Madame Hubbard at Councillor Huggins’ suggestion, in aid of the Thirty Thousand Fund for the Kingsport Hospital, disgusted Mr. Drew. He sent his daughter home and himself remained a martyr to public duty, seated upon a narrow bench in the shilling enclosure, scolding Huggins.

Usually these two agreed. Both were Methodists; both were Puritans; each sometimes could render the other a little service. Drew had often notified the preacher of possible haulage contracts, Huggins had introduced clients requiring homes to the agent.