The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (5 page)

"That is a Citroen," said Rose Stanley about a motor car that had passed by. "They are French."

"Sandy, dear, don't rush. Take my hand," said Miss Brodie. "Rose, your mind is full of motor cars. There is nothing wrong with motor cars, of course, but there are higher things. I'm sure Sandy's mind is not on motor cars, she is paying attention to my conversation like a wellmannered girl." And if people take their clothes off in front of each other, thought Sandy, it is so rude, they are bound to be put off their passion for a moment. And if they are put off just for a single moment, how can they be swept away in the urge? If it all happens in a flash... Miss Brodie said, "So I intend simply to point out to Miss Mackay that there is a radical difference in our principles of education. Radical is a word pertaining to roots â Latin radix, a root. We differ at root, the headmistress and I, upon the question whether we are employed to educate the minds of girls or to intrude upon them. We have had this argument before, but Miss Mackay is not, I may say, an outstanding logician. A logician is one skilled in logic. Logic is the art of reasoning. What is logic, Rose?"

"To do with reasoning, ma'am," said Rose, who later, while still in her teens, was to provoke Miss Brodie's amazement and then her awe and finally her abounding enthusiasm for the role which Rose then appeared to be enacting: that of a great lover, magnificently elevated above the ordinary run of lovers, above the moral laws, Venus incarnate, something set apart. In fact, Rose was not at the time in question engaged in the love affair which Miss Brodie thought she was, but it seemed so, and Rose was famous for sex. But in her mere eleventh year, on the winter's walk, Rose was taking note of the motor cars and Miss Brodie had not yet advanced far enough into her prime to speak of sex except by veiled allusion, as when she said of her warrior lover, "He was a pure man," or when she read from James Hogg's poem "Bonnie Kilmeny,"

Kilmeny was pure as pure could be and added, "Which is to say, she did not go to the glen in order to mix with men."

"When I see Miss Mackay on Monday morning," said Miss Brodie, "I shall point out that by the terms of my employment my methods cannot be condemned unless they can be proved to be in any part improper or subversive, and so long as the girls are in the least equipped for the end-of-term examination. I trust you girls to work hard and try and scrape through, even if you learn up the stuff and forget it next day. As for impropriety, it could never be imputed to me except by some gross distortion on the part of a traitor. I do not think ever to be betrayed. Miss Mackay is younger than I am and higher salaried. That is by accident. The best qualifications available at the University in my time were inferior to those open to Miss Mackay. That is why she holds the senior position. But her reasoning power is deficient, and so I have no fears for Monday."

"Miss Mackay has an awfully red face, with the veins all showing," said Rose.

"I can't permit that type of remark to pass in my presence, Rose," said Miss Brodie, "for it would be disloyal."

They had come to the end of Lauriston Place, past the fire station, where they were to get on a tram car to go to tea with Miss Brodie in her flat at Churchhill. A very long queue of men lined this part of the street. They were without collars, in shabby suits. They were talking and spitting and smoking little bits of cigarette held between middle finger and thumb.

"We shall cross here," said Miss Brodie and herded the set across the road. Monica Douglas whispered, "They are the Idle."

"In England they are called the Unemployed. They are waiting to get their dole from the labour bureau," said Miss Brodie. "You must all pray for the Unemployed, I will write you out the special prayer for them. You all know what the dole is?" Eunice Gardiner had not heard of it.

"It is the weekly payment made by the State for the relief of the unemployed and their families. Sometimes they go and spend their dole on drink before they go home, and their children starve. They are our brothers. Sandy, stop staring at once. In Italy the Unemployment problem has been solved."

Sandy felt that she was not staring across the road at the endless queue of brothers, but that it was pulling her eyes towards it. She felt once more very frightened. Some of the men looked over at the girls, but without seeing them. The girls had reached the tram stop. The men were talking and spitting a great deal. Some were laughing with hacking laughs merging into coughs and ending up with spits.

As they waited for the tram car Miss Brodie said, "I had lodgings in this street when first I came to Edinburgh as a student. I must tell you a story about the landlady, who was very frugal. It was her habit to come to me every morning to ask what I would have for breakfast, and she spoke like this: 'Wud ye have a red herrin? â no ye wouldn't. Could ye eat a boilt egg?

â no ye couldn't.' The result was, I never had but bread and butter to my breakfast all the time I was in those lodgings, and very little of that."

The laughter of the girls met that of the men opposite, who had now begun to file slowly by fits and starts into the labour bureau. Sandy's fear returned as soon as she had stopped laughing. She saw the slow jerkily moving file tremble with life, she saw it all of a piece like one dragon's body which had no right to be in the city and yet would not go away and was unslayable. She thought of the starving children. This was a relief to her fear. She wanted to cry as she always did when she saw a street singer or a beggar. She wanted Jenny to be there, because Jenny cried easily about poor children. But the snaky creature opposite started to shiver in the cold and made Sandy tremble again. She turned and said to Mary Macgregor who had brushed against her sleeve, "Stop pushing."

"Mary, dear, you mustn't push," said Miss Brodie.

"I wasn't pushing," said Mary.

In the tram car Sandy excused herself from tea with Miss Brodie on the plea that she thought she had a cold coming on. Indeed she shivered. She wanted at that moment to be warmly at home, outside which even the corporate Brodie set lived in a colder sort of way. But later, when Sandy thought of Eunice doing somersaults and splits on Miss Brodie's kitchen linoleum while the other girls washed up, she rather wished she had gone to tea at Miss Brodie's after all. She took out her secret notebook from between the sheets of music and added a chapter to "The Mountain Eyrie," the true love story of Miss Jean Brodie. 3

The days passed and the wind blew from the Forth.

It is not to be supposed that Miss Brodie was unique at this point of her prime; or that (since such things are relative) she was in any way off her head. She was alone, merely, in that she taught in a school like Marcia Blaine's. There were legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties, women from the age of thirty and upward, who crowded their war-bereaved spinsterhood with voyages of discovery into new ideas and energetic practices in art or social welfare, education or religion. The progressive spinsters of Edinburgh did not teach in schools, especially in schools of traditional character like Marcia Blaine's School for Girls. It was in this that Miss Brodie was, as the rest of the staff spinsterhood put it, a trifle out of place. But she was not out of place amongst her own kind, the vigorous daughters of dead or enfeebled merchants, of ministers of religion, University professors, doctors, big warehouse owners of the past, or the owners of fisheries who had endowed these daughters with shrewd wits, highcoloured cheeks, constitutions like horses, logical educations, hearty spirits and private means. They could be seen leaning over the democratic counters of Edinburgh grocers' shops arguing with the Manager at three in the afternoon on every subject from the authenticity of the Scriptures to the question what the word "guaranteed" on a jam-jar really meant. They went to lectures, tried living on honey and nuts, took lessons in German and then went walking in Germany; they bought caravans and went off with them into the hills among the lochs; they played the guitar, they supported all the new little theatre companies; they took lodgings in the slums and, distributing pots of paint, taught their neighbours the arts of simple interior decoration; they preached the inventions of Marie Stopes; they attended the meetings of the Oxford Group and put Spiritualism to their hawk-eyed test. Some assisted in the Scottish Nationalist Movement; others, like Miss Brodie, called themselves Europeans and Edinburgh a European capital, the city of Hume and Boswell.

They were not, however, committee women. They were not school-teachers. The committee spinsters were less enterprising and not at all rebellious, they were sober churchgoers and quiet workers. The school-mistresses were of a still more orderly type, earning their keep, living with aged parents and taking walks on the hills and holidays at North Berwick.

But those of Miss Brodie's kind were great talkers and feminists and, like most feminists, talked to men as man-to-man.

"I tell you this, Mr. Geddes, birth control is the only answer to the problem of the working class. A free issue to every household..."

And often in the thriving grocers' shops at three in the afternoon:

"Mr. Logan, Elder though you are, I am a woman in my prime of life, so you can take it from me that you get a sight more religion out of Professor Tovey's Sunday concerts than you do out of your kirk services."

And so, seen in this light, there was nothing outwardly odd about Miss Brodie. Inwardly was a different matter, and it remained to be seen, towards what extremities her nature worked her. Outwardly she differed from the rest of the teaching staff in that she was still in a state of fluctuating development, whereas they had only too understandably not trusted themselves to change their minds, particularly on ethical questions, after the age of twenty. There was nothing Miss Brodie could not yet learn, she boasted of it. And it was not a static Miss Brodie who told her girls, "These are the years of my prime. You are benefiting by my prime," but one whose nature was growing under their eyes, as the girls themselves were under formation. It extended, this prime of Miss Brodie's, still in the making when the girls were well on in their teens. And the principles governing the end of her prime would have astonished herself at the beginning of it.

The summer holidays of nineteen-thirty-one marked the first anniversary of the launching of Miss Brodie's prime. The year to come was in many ways the most sexual year of the Brodie set, who were now turned eleven and twelve; it was a crowded year of stirring revelations. In later years, sex was only one of the things in life. That year it was everything. The term opened vigorously as usual. Miss Brodie stood bronzed before her class and said, "I have spent most of my summer holidays in Italy once more, and a week in London, and I have brought back a great many pictures which we can pin on the wall. Here is a Cimabue. Here is a larger formation of Mussolini's fascisti, it is a better view of them than that of last year's picture. They are doing splendid things as I shall tell you later. I went with my friends for an audience with the Pope.

My friends kissed his ring but I thought it proper only to bend over it. I wore a long black gown with a lace mantilla, and looked magnificent. In London my friends who are wellto-do â their small girl has two nurses, or nannies as they say in England â took me to visit A. A. Milne. In the hall was hung a reproduction of Botticelli's Primavera which means The Birth of Spring. I wore my silk dress with the large red poppies which is just right for my colouring. Mussolini is one of the greatest men in the world, far more so than Ramsay MacDonald, and his fascistiâââ"

"Good morning, Miss Brodie. Good morning, sit down, girls," said the headmistress who had entered in a hurry, leaving the door wide open.

Miss Brodie passed behind her with her head up, up, and shut the door with the utmost meaning.

"I have only just looked in," said Miss Mackay, "and I have to be off. Well, girls, this is the first day of the new session. Are we downhearted? No. You girls must work hard this year at every subject and pass your qualifying examination with flying colours. Next year you will be in the Senior school, remember. I hope you've all had a nice summer holiday, you all look nice and brown. I hope in due course of time to read your essays on how you spent them." When she had gone Miss Brodie looked hard at the door for a long time. A girl, not of her set, called Judith, giggled. Miss Brodie said to Judith, "That will do." She turned to the blackboard and rubbed out with her duster the long division sum she always kept on the blackboard in case of intrusions from outside during any arithmetic period when Miss Brodie should happen not to be teaching arithmetic. When she had done this she turned back to the class and said, "Are we downhearted no, are we downhearted no. As I was saying, Mussolini has performed feats of magnitude and unemployment is even farther abolished under him than it was last year. I shall be able to tell you a great deal this term. As you know, I don't believe in talking down to children, you are capable of grasping more than is generally appreciated by your elders. Education means a leading out, from e, out and duco, I lead. Qualifying examination or no qualifying examination, you will have the benefit of my experiences in Italy. In Rome I saw the Forum and I saw the Colosseum where the gladiators died and the slaves were thrown to the lions. A vulgar American remarked to me, 'It looks like a mighty fine quarry.' They talk nasally. Mary, what does to talk nasally mean?" Mary did not know.

"Stupid as ever," said Miss Brodie. "Eunice?"

"Through your nose," said Eunice.

"Answer in a complete sentence, please," said Miss Brodie. "This year I think you should all start answering in complete sentences, I must try to remember this rule. Your correct answer is 'To talk nasally means to talk through one's nose.' The American said, 'It looks like a mighty fine quarry.' Ah! It was there the gladiators fought. 'Hail Caesar!' they cried. These about to die salute thee!'"

Miss Brodie stood in her brown dress like a gladiator with raised arm and eyes flashing like a sword. "Hail Caesar!" she cried again, turning radiantly to the window light, as if Caesar sat there. "Who opened the window?" said Miss Brodie dropping her arm. Nobody answered.