Читать книгу The Headmistress - Angela Margaret Thirkell - Страница 4

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By a miracle, not unassisted by the unobtrusive efforts of Commander Belton, the whole family were down to breakfast on Sunday morning quite soon after nine. Mrs. Belton knew better than to ask if anyone was coming to church, but to her surprised pleasure Charles offered to accompany her. Freddy and Elsa proposed to do some work in the garden, which had been gently running to seed during Mrs. Admiral Ellangowan-Hornby’s illness, and plant out a lot of winter greens that the old gardener from the Park had brought down.

To Mrs. Belton’s feeling of pleasure that one child at least would accompany her, there succeeded as the morning wore on the familiar feeling that he would never be ready in time. So at half-past ten she went up to see how he was getting on. Rather as she expected his whole bedroom was strewn with equipment, and as she had feared the bathroom was also one litter of boots, belts, brass polish, shoe polish and dirty rags. Her youngest son in shirt sleeves, smoking a pipe, his hair tousled and on end, was sitting on the side of his bed cleaning his leggings on the counterpane.

“We will have to be starting for church quite soon, Charles,” she said anxiously.

“What do you think of these buttons, mother?” said Charles, taking no notice at all of her question. “I can’t get my batman to do them like that, the lazy brute.”

“They are splendid!” said his mother with forced heartiness,

“You will be ready by a quarter to, darling, won’t you. And would you like my nail scissors? Your nails really won’t quite do for church.”

“No thanks,” said Charles, breathing on a button and rubbing it to a yet more glistening polish. “Anyway I don’t need scissors. A matchstick will do.”

“Well, I must get ready,” said his mother. “If you aren’t down by a quarter to I’ll walk on slowly.”

She looked imploringly at her youngest son. He did not say the words, “Oh, don’t fuss,” but they were so clearly implied by the earnestness with which he applied himself to another button that his mother gave it up and went away. At a quarter to eleven she was ready in the drawing-room, at twelve minutes to eleven she was standing in the hall looking up the stairs, not quite daring to call her son. At ten minutes to eleven she very slowly left the house and very slowly walked towards the church, whither her husband had preceded her, as he liked to make sure that the markers were in the right place for him when he mounted the eagle to read the lessons. In the little avenue of pollarded limes that led to the church she met several friends and acquaintances and lingered to speak with them, casting an occasional look over her shoulder; but no khaki-clad figure was in sight. So she went in and took her usual place in the Harefield Park pew and knelt in meditation which was less directed to heavenly things than to trying to choke down her disappointment that Charles had not come. True he had offered to come and usually kept his word sooner or later; but it was so much more often later, as she knew by long experience, that she resigned herself and looked round the church.

The usual village people were in their places; mostly elderly men and women now, and a sprinkling of young mothers rather anxious over their children’s behaviour. The pews in the north aisle were filled with what were obviously the Hosiers’ girls, quite a pleasant, uninteresting, fresh-faced lot in the school uniform of grey flannel skirts and a rather shapeless purple flannel blazer with the Hosiers’ badge (an unknown object supposed to represent a hand loom and the motto Fide et Industria which, as Miss Sparling had remarked in moments of exasperation with her Governors, had nothing to do with the case), later in the year to be covered by the school overcoat of grey cloth with a purple collar so that no one could wear it without shame in the holidays. A pudding-bowl grey felt hat with a purple ribbon completed the outfit, but as the manufacturers’ stocks were now practically exhausted, an Act of Grace had been passed permitting girls to wear their own clothes provided they were suitable: a concession of which the dressier girls were going to take every advantage.

There were one or two elderly or obviously slightly deformed mistresses in charge, but no one whom Mrs. Belton could place as a headmistress. The choir, now reduced to three boys, the tailor’s daughter who was exempt because of her eyes, and the grocer’s one assistant who was over fifty, took its place; the organ made a kind of noise; Mr. Oriel hurried out of the vestry, and at the same moment Mrs. Belton felt rather than saw (for the Park pew was in the front) the heads of the whole congregation turned towards the door. The mass movement compelled her also to turn and she saw her youngest son pausing just inside the church, every button winking in the sun which slanted down from the clerestory windows, his green béret at what she privately thought an extremely vulgar angle. Apparently unconscious of the effect he had made, he removed his béret, came with reverent haste up the aisle, walked with solicitous deference over his father’s legs, sat down between his parents, and placing the béret tenderly on the seat, knelt, absorbed in prayer.

Mrs. Belton went through the service in a kind of waking swoon, gradually recovering consciousness as she perceived that her son was not showing off and had even gone so far as to clean his nails: sketchily it was true, but the readiness was all. And by the time Mr. Oriel began his sermon and everyone settled down to try to think of something to think about, she was so bursting with pride over Charles’s good looks and martial bearing, that if Mr. Oriel had read aloud a Declaration of Indulgences she would have been none the wiser.

The service concluded, and two shillings supplied by Mr. Belton for Charles to put in the plate, or rather the embroidered Liberty-green lozenge-shaped bag supported on a kind of small ecclesiastical turned broom handle, the congregation moved shufflingly out into the lime avenue. The Hosiers’ girls emerged in a neat crocodile with the mistresses walking beside it and among them a woman who must have been concealed from Mrs. Belton by a pillar, so obviously was she the headmistress.

On an impulse Mrs. Belton went up to her and asked if she were Miss Sparling. The crocodile wavered and stood still, its eyes mostly fixed on Lieutenant Charles Belton’s green béret and on the wearer below it.

“Yes, I am,” said the apparent headmistress in a very pleasant voice and with a questioning smile.

“I am so sorry, but I’m Mrs. Belton,” said the former mistress of Harefield Park. “I do hope the engine for the electric light is working all right, because it mostly doesn’t. Fred!” she called to her husband, “This is my husband—Miss Sparling. And this is my second boy, Charles!”

Charles, who was gently scowling (though it suited him very well) at his mother’s slow progress, came forward and saluted.

“Oh, it was you that came in yesterday,” said Miss Sparling, “I wish you could have stopped to tea. My girls were quite excited.”

Charles, who had not been unaware of the havoc his béret was making, looked sheepish. Miss Sparling, who obviously looked upon him as a mere child (much to his annoyance), then turned to his mother, and speaking as an equal, though with a pretty air of deference to fallen Royalty, said so far the engine had behaved beautifully and she was sure the girls would be very happy in a real home, and would do their very best to treat it kindly. Mrs. Belton then asked if she might come and call. Miss Sparling said she would be delighted, and if Mrs. Belton would not think it too abrupt, would she come to tea that afternoon, as the first Sunday in the term was always a good day for visitors.

“If Mr. Belton would come too, it would be a great pleasure,” said Miss Sparling. “And do bring——” Charles thought she was going to say “your little boy,” but she finished the sentence—“your son with you.”

Mrs. Belton said they would love to come and if her elder son and her daughter had not made other plans for their short leave, might she bring them too. The crocodile re-formed. A large girl, who had been looking at the talkers, dropped her prayer book and picked it up again and the school went away.

Mr. Oriel then approached.

“Oh, Mr. Oriel,” said Mrs. Belton, “I wish you had been here. I was talking to Miss Sparling and she seems very nice. We are all going up to tea with her this afternoon. You might have come too.”

“I have already been invited,” said Mr. Oriel nervously. “Miss Sparling was at the eight o’clock service with a few of the elder girls. They came on bicycles and we had a few words afterwards while some of them were pumping up their tyres. I feel I may have prejudged her unfairly. Perry has such a way of jumping to conclusions and he gave me a totally erroneous idea of her.”

“Then we’ll all meet later,” said Mr. Belton, who was tired of all this gossiping. “Come along, Lucy, we’ll be late for lunch.”

At the lunch table Mrs. Belton conveyed Miss Sparling’s tea invitation to the rest of the family.

“I do want to go and yet I don’t,” she said. “I think Miss Sparling is nice and I’d like to show we feel friendly to her, but I am feeling rather a coward about the Park. I might suddenly forget I don’t live there and try to go up to my own bedroom and find it full of giggling girls.”

“Poor mother,” said Elsa kindly but bracingly. “I expect a mistress is in my room, with a nightgown case embroidered with lilies of the valley and a hairbrush with the bristles worn down.”

“There’s only one person I’d hate to think of in my room,” said Charles, “that’s the beef to the instep girl. Did you see her after church, Mother?”

Mrs. Belton said which was it.

“Oh well, if you didn’t see her,” said Charles with slight scorn. “The one that dropped her prayer book. I suppose she thought I was going to pick it up.”

“Rather a large girl?” said his mother.

Charles merely said she had said it. The sort that would play back at hockey, and give you an almighty swipe across the shins and could he have a lot more of that apple pudding. As Mrs. Belton looked at his plate and indeed the plates of all her children, she felt extremely glad that they still had some of the fruit and vegetables from the Park to depend on and the milk and cream of their own cows. For the Hosiers’ girls were registered with the Pomfret Towers Dairy Ltd., and the Beltons’ cows remained their property, which was just as well, for William Humble, the old cowman, would sooner have thrown all the milk into the lake than let anyone but the family have it, or lost the illegal profits he made by selling to some of his friends.

“Well, Lucy, what do you think of that Miss Sterling?” said Mr. Belton. “Quite a pleasant woman, I thought, and not bad-looking. It might be much worse.”

Elsa said she had seen enough of headmistresses when she was a boarder at the Barchester High School, and if it had been Miss Pettinger at the Park she would have refused to visit her. Anyway, she said, this one seemed to be a lady and the Pettinger wasn’t.

A shocked exclamation from her mother led to a most interesting discussion as to what a lady really was; or what really was a lady. In this debate Mr. and Mrs. Belton did not take much part, for Miss Sparling was in a sense their guest and it seemed to them the height of ill-breeding to discuss the question of her being a lady at all.

“I suppose to a duke, or even a marquis, we all seem pretty common,” said Elsa. “But if one of us married a duke I suppose we’d manage all right. As a matter of fact it must be much nicer not to be a lady now, because then one would have a lot more friends. Being a kind of lady makes one a bit particular even if one tries not to be. Some of the girls at my job are real ladies. I mean, like me if I am a lady, but the rest aren’t. I mean they are awfully clever and good-looking and say the right things, but somehow they aren’t just right. And all their people seem quite rich, but I don’t think they’d fit in at Harefield. I suppose I’m a perfectly beastly snob, but I can’t help it.”

Mrs. Belton thought of her own youth, so sheltered, among girls of her own sort who might look funny now with their heavy knobs or puffs of hair, their long skirts, their unadorned lips and finger-nails, their mothers’ eye always more or less over them, but were all what she roughly called one’s own sort. And then she thought of her Elsa, brought up in what had almost amounted of late to genteel poverty, and now absorbed in whatever her secret work was, among a lot of young women who must undeniably have brains or they wouldn’t be there, but many of whom her daughter, in normal times, would never have come across. All this mixing might be a good thing, but she felt too old for it and frankly hated it.

“It’s a queer mixed lot everywhere now,” said Mr. Belton. “There are men on the Bench that don’t know a gamekeeper from a poacher and think kindness pays with young hooligans that steal and destroy other people’s property. There’s a man sitting with me now that employs two thousand men at Hogglestock and heaven knows how many more over the other side of Barchester, and dresses like something on the stage. He may be all right, I don’t say he isn’t, but he throws his weight about and gets petrol when nobody else does, and frankly the less of him I see the better pleased I am.”

“Bad luck, father,” said Commander Belton sympathetically. “Of course we do get a few queer fish at the Admiralty, but taking it by and large the Navy isn’t too bad. When you’re all doing things together everything shakes down; and when we’re at sea we don’t worry much about whom we’ll meet on land.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Charles, who had obviously been wrestling with an unformulated thought for some time, “if you get awfully mucky and sweaty with a lot of fellows over your tanks, you find they’re all right. At least our lot are.”

Having brought this thought to birth he scraped the rest of the apple pudding on to his plate and covered it with the rest of the cream.

“If only life were one long crisis, everyone would be perfect,” said Mrs. Belton.

“But luckily it isn’t,” said her husband. “Don’t talk nonsense, my dear.”

“Well, I do hope my son-in-law and daughters-in-law will be our sort,” said Mrs. Belton wistfully. “Of course I’d love anyone any of you married, but it would be much more fun if it was someone like ourselves.”

“In books girls marry their bosses,” said Elsa, “but all mine have hundreds of wives and children. I’m concentrating on a career. If you get engaged the man only goes and gets killed or taken prisoner, and by the time the war’s over there won’t be a spare man left. So I’m going to be the perfect woman secretary and marry a Cabinet Minister as his second wife and be photographed looking quite hideous.”

“There won’t be a single gentleman in the Cabinet in five years,” said Mr. Belton gloomily.

“I suppose I’ll get killed,” said Charles, who was making havoc among Lady Norton’s biscuits, “so I needn’t worry. But I do wish there were some nice girls here for my leave. Even what you call nice, mother, would do.”

“Perhaps we’ll find some at Miss Sparling’s school,” said Commander Belton. “If I can find an heiress, father, I’ll marry her however common and pay off the mortgage and rebuild the almshouses and restore the family fortunes.”

His father was about to protest violently that the place wasn’t mortgaged and the almshouses were in perfectly good condition, but suddenly realizing that it was a joke he said Freddy had better marry that stout girl that was Charles’s friend, and the conversation moved to other topics.

A pleasing feature of the houses on the south side of the High Street was that the long gardens each communicated directly with the park by a door in the end wall. The keys remained the property of the reigning Belton and were not lightly bestowed. The Perrys at Plassey House had one, so had Mr. Updike the solicitor at Clive’s Corner, Mrs. Hoare the widow of the former Pomfret estate agent at Dowlah Cottage, and a few other well-deserving tenants. Arcot House possessed one till Mrs. Ellangowan-Hornby had her stroke. A month or so after this the old lady had sent for Mr. Belton and summoning all her will-power, which was considerable, had forced her swollen tongue to utter and her almost helpless hand to write a few words stating that the key had been returned to her landlord. Having so delivered herself, in the presence of both her nurses (the interview having been expressly arranged at an hour when the day nurse went off duty and the night nurse came on), she made a few inarticulate sounds interpreted by the night nurse as “so that the nurses shan’t use it,” and relapsed into her usual immobile state, only showing by a fitful twinkling of her eyes her extreme pleasure at having got the better of her attendants.

So instead of going out of the front door, up the street, past the church and the Nabob’s Head, in at the lodge gates and up the mile of winding drive, the Belton family walked through their garden, went through the door at the end, and emerged upon a rough lane by which wood and coals were apt to deliver themselves. They then climbed a stile almost opposite their garden door and took a footpath which ran slanting across the park to the house. This path was at once the treasure and the plague of its possessor. It was a very old right of way which had been used by the villagers for hundreds of years to get to Little Misfit, skirting the Park grounds as they went, and passing directly under the windows of the West Pavilion. Under the orders of the War Agricultural Executive Committee Mr. Belton had put that part of his land under the plough. But sooner than interfere with the people’s rights, he had the roller taken over the course of the path every year and took each summer a sad pleasure in seeing his neighbours walking on their ancestral way between the ripening corn. No one was grateful and the faithful tenantry were more than apt to walk two and even three or four abreast, thus contributing their mite to the war effort by treading down the corn. But no one was more annoyed than the secretary of the local branch of the Hikers’ Rights Preservation Society. This gentleman, who was a small chemist and a keen opposer of what he called feudal arrogance, spent most of his time walking over the field paths of the district (a job which owing to the excellent and complex network of rights of way took him roughly eleven months of every year), hoping to find evidence of arrogance in blocked, overgrown or ploughed-up paths. But much to his fury the landlords, large and small, appeared to be as interested in the paths as he was, and Roddy Wicklow, the Pomfret estate agent, back on leave with a wound in his leg, meeting him one day near Six Covers Corner, had taken a malicious pleasure in forcing the champion of the people’s rights to walk through three-quarters of a mile of a small sunk lane deeply embedded in thorn trees and brambles with a stream running down the middle of it, which lane had fallen into disuse simply because the public, and hikers in particular, were too lazy to use it, preferring to tread down Lord Pomfret’s corn on one side, or frighten his gravid Alderney cows on the other. Each successive autumn since Mr. Belton ploughed the park had this elderly Gracchus watched the ploughing with an auspicious (as hoping to get Mr. Belton into trouble by its means) and a drooping (as one mourning the final extinction of Magna Carta) eye. And each successive autumn had he experienced the mortification of seeing the path neatly rolled out and Mr. Belton taking a ceremonial walk across it, which did not prevent his doing a good deal of boasting at the H.R.P.S. yearly meeting.

At this moment of the year the stubble lay pale and mangy, not yet touched by the plough. The clumps of beeches, where a branch here and there was just beginning to flame into pale gold, looked strangely isolated to Mr. and Mrs. Belton, who still always thought of them as standing on a grassy slope, with sheep wandering among them.

“There were still some deer here when my father was a boy,” said Mr. Belton as they breasted the gentle slope.

His three children looked at one another. As far as they could remember their father had made this remark when crossing the park ever since they could walk with him. At ordinary times it would produce an irritation which caused them to make hideous faces at each other, or even mutter under their breath, but to-day, what with the good lunch, the excitement of the new home and the feeling of how rum it was to be visiting their own house as guests, they only smiled in a tolerant way, Commander Belton going so far as to reply, “Nice little things. Very pretty they must have looked.”

As they approached the West Pavilion there was a short discussion as to whether they were expected to go up to the front door, or slink in at the side, ended by the appearance of Miss Sparling at her private entrance.

“Please come in,” she called to the visitors. “I thought we would have tea here first and look at the school afterwards. I can’t tell you,” she added to Mrs. Belton as she took them into the pavilion, “how heavenly it is to have a kind of home of one’s own again. I have managed to get my books and some of my furniture down and no one’s allowed to come here unless I ask them. The Governors very kindly got me an extension telephone put in.”

So speaking she took them into what had been one of the bachelors’ bedrooms, shut up of late years as there was no one whose business it was to keep it clean. There were books all along one side, uninteresting but quite presentable chairs and tables, and on the walls what Mrs. Belton recognized as the very large excellent photographs of Greek and Roman remains taken by Mr. Belton’s grandfather, a keen amateur of the wet plate, when abroad on his honeymoon, long ago banished to the billiard room.

“I hope you don’t mind,” said Miss Sparling, following Mrs. Belton’s glance. “I like them so much, and it seemed a pity for no one to look at them.”

“Quite right,” said Mr. Belton. “Not a bit the sort of thing for the billiard room. Enough to put you off your stroke. Aren’t you using the billiard room then?”

“I’m afraid we can’t this term, because of the heating,” said Miss Sparling. “But in the spring I shall let some of the elder girls play.”

“Good God!” said Mr. Belton, and checked himself. What he was going to say was, “They’ll cut the cloth,” but a sudden recollection that the Hosiers’ Company, and thus Miss Sparling as their representative, were for the present the legal owners of his billiard table and paying the insurance on it, besides his gentlemanly wish not to embarrass a lady, made him leave it unsaid.

His son Charles, less inhibited, said, “Oh Lord! I mean is it all right? I mean a cue’s an awkward thing if you aren’t used to it. I remember cutting the cloth at Pomfret Towers when I was a kid and getting told off like anything.”

Miss Sparling smiled at Charles in a way that made him slightly uneasy and said to Mrs. Belton, “Please sit down and we’ll have tea at once.” She then rang the bell and continued, “I hope you won’t feel nervous about the table, Mr. Belton. As a matter of fact a good many of our girls play at home. And Miss Holly, my secretary, whom I would like to introduce you to later, is a very good amateur.”

At this moment the door opened and tea was brought in by a stout girl of about fifteen whom Mrs. Belton at once recognized as Ellen Humble, granddaughter of her cowman. On seeing Mrs. Belton Ellen nearly dropped the tray, but was saved by Commander Belton who helped her to steady it and place it on the table. Mrs. Belton asked after her mother, but Ellen, overcome by the attentions of a real naval officer, was reduced to idiocy and bundled herself out of the room.

“A very good girl,” said Miss Sparling, taking no notice of her handmaid’s behaviour. “My Governors didn’t like the idea of my sleeping alone out here, so Ellen is sleeping in the little room at the back, in case burglars come.”

“But would she be much use?” said Elsa.

“Not a bit,” said Miss Sparling calmly. “But after she has gone to sleep at nine o’clock nothing wakes her. As she couldn’t do anything to a burglar except stare or giggle, it makes me feel much more peaceful.”

Mr. Belton looked at Miss Sparling with a mixture of pity and admiration, which made no apparent impression on that lady at all. Seen at close quarters and in her own surroundings, Miss Sparling was far from unattractive; a tall, well-built woman, about forty-five at a guess, with a not unbecoming majesty of figure, dark wavy hair cut rather short and lying close to her head, large brown eyes, good teeth, neat feet and well-shaped, competent hands. Her voice as we already know was pleasant, and though her face had in repose a rather commanding expression, her smile softened it very becomingly.

“I am expecting Mr. Oriel,” she said. “He has probably gone to the front door, and I left word that he was to be brought here.”

“Miss Sparling,” said Charles, with the desperation of one who has been waiting to ask an indiscreet question for some time and can contain himself no longer, “when you said your girls played billiards at home, I thought the Hosiers’ Girls’ School was a kind of secondary school. I don’t mean rudely, but I saw some of the Hosiers’ boys when they were at Southbridge School and they weren’t quite what you would call a public school, I mean they did awfully well in exams, but they weren’t—oh, well, you know what I mean, only it’s so awfully difficult to say what one means, only they didn’t seem as if they’d have billiard tables at home if it isn’t rude to say so.”

By this time Charles’s family would have been quite glad if he had been back in his billet at Shrimpington-on-Sea, and indeed Charles himself, hearing his own voice faltering in an embarrassed vacuum, wouldn’t have been sorry if he could have been miraculously transported elsewhere. But Miss Sparling appeared to take his tactless questions quite as a matter of course, and was about to answer him when the extension telephone rang to say that Mr. Oriel had been rescued from the front door and was even now on his way to the pavilion under the guard of Miss Holly. There was a slight rearranging of chairs to make room for the newcomers and then Miss Holly, a short stout woman with small black eyes and a very businesslike air, came in with the Vicar. Miss Sparling greeted her guest kindly, introduced Miss Holly to the Beltons and told Ellen Humble to bring some more hot water.

Conversation was made easy by Miss Sparling and Mrs. Belton, both accomplished hostesses, and Mr. Oriel who could always be relied upon. Elsa discovered that Miss Holly had two friends in the hush-hush business and had very sound views about Miss Pettinger, Mr. Belton talked to his eldest son about the estate, and Charles made a very hearty tea in spite of his tactless remarks a few moments earlier.

“I was thinking,” said Mr. Oriel, whose hospitality was as unbounded as his housekeeper’s cooking was good, even in the fifth year of a totalitarian war, “of a little dinner party to honour my new parishioner. I hardly like to ask a lady to come out at night, but the blackout is still well after seven o’clock, we would dine at half-past, and I will get the Nabob’s Head to send its little car for you and take you back. They will always do this for me if it is a short distance and due notice is given. Would you feel equal to it, Miss Sparling? And if so, will you name a day convenient to you perhaps next week, before the blackout gets any earlier. Not Sunday, for it would mean a cold supper, I fear, rather late; and not Friday because it is the Confirmation Class.”

Miss Sparling thanked him and said perhaps a Wednesday then, which was quite a good evening for her.

“Wednesday, how stupid of me, is the British Legion smoking concert,” said Mr. Oriel, “and though they would feel honoured if I brought you, it begins at seven o’clock and usually goes on till about half-past nine with the interval for refreshments.”

Miss Sparling said Thursday would make a pleasant break in the week.

“Thursday then,” said Mr. Oriel, much gratified. “Oh dear, my housekeeper goes out on Thursday, and though she is very kind about changing her day to suit me, she has done it twice running, once because I had a cold and once because she had, so I feel a certain diffidence about asking her again.”

Miss Sparling said Monday, if not too short notice, would be a very pleasant way of beginning the week.

“Excellent, excellent,” said Mr. Oriel. “I hope, Mrs. Belton, that you and your husband will come. I shall ask the Perrys, and that will make us six.”

Mrs. Belton, who always tried to accept evening invitations in the village as it was the only way of getting her husband to see people at leisure, said they would be delighted.

“Good, good,” said Mr. Oriel, pulling out a notebook. “I shall make a note of it. That is next Monday evening then. There is something down here, but I must have written it without my glasses on, for it is quite illegible. Siskin? No, it can’t be that. Bisley? I often say to myself,” said Mr. Oriel, looking up from his engagement book, “that I must learn to do things slowly and in order. I have some new glasses and I cannot get used to them, so I don’t put them on; and I am brought to confusion. Oh!” he continued with a change of tone, “I have got it. Bishop. Of course he would choose that date; just like him,” said Mr. Oriel, who in common with practically all the clergy of Barchester, except old Canon Robarts who had been gently mad for years, entertained most unchristian feelings towards his overlord. “He has summoned me to the Palace,” he continued with what he felt to be an accent of biting sarcasm on the summoned, “at six o’clock and that means I can’t possibly get a bus back till the 7.25. There is much to be said for the constitution of the Church of Scotland. I doubt whether even a Moderator would exercise such petty tyranny as his present lordship. But I forget myself. If the Bishop is a friend of yours, Miss Sparling, I must apologize most sincerely.”

“Please do not,” said Miss Sparling. “The Bishop and his wife are great friends of Miss Pettinger with whom I have been living. Miss Pettinger did once take me to a meeting at the Palace where I sat in a corner and didn’t know anyone, but that is the beginning and end of my association with them.”

This was said in a pleasant level voice, without any tinge of acrimony, but it was common knowledge, though not through any indiscretion of Miss Sparling’s, that her bread had been bitter and Miss Pettinger’s stairs very hard to her, and her hearers expressed their sympathy in a kind of hum or murmur as of a Puritan congregation applauding an inspired corporal’s words of edification.

Mr. Oriel almost said Hurrah! but checking himself, and deciding with the incredible swiftness of unworded thought that neither Alleluia nor Kyrie Eleison though exactly expressing his feelings would be entirely in place, he put his notebook back in whichever pocket a clergyman keeps his notebook in.

“Then I fear that leaves us only Tuesday,” said Mr. Oriel penitently. “That is if you would not mind my being a little late as I have to take a funeral for a dear old friend at Nutfield that afternoon and stay to tea with the family and there is only one bus back which is usually behind time.”

Miss Sparling said that would be delightful.

“You can’t, Mr. Oriel, if it’s the bus I didn’t come in,” said Elsa, “because it’s off. I got a lift on a motor-bike with a friend of Charles’s, but he’s gone to Rickmansworth.”

This depressing news threw everyone into a fever of trying to arrange Mr. Oriel’s Tuesday afternoon for him, but short of cutting the funeral altogether, there was nothing for it but that he should go by train from Nutfield to Barchester and come out by the 7.25 bus. Silence fell.

“I say, Mr. Oriel,” said Charles, “when you said it was a dear old friend you were doing the funeral for, was it the one who’s dead or the parson?”

Mr. Oriel looked puzzled. Mr. Belton said What was that Charles was saying.

“Don’t be an idiot, Charles,” said Elsa. “He means are you taking a friend’s funeral or a funeral for a friend, Mr. Oriel.”

“I suppose one would call it my friend’s funeral,” said Mr. Oriel doubtfully. “It is the Vicar of Nutfield.”

“But he’s not dead,” said Mr. Belton. “At least he rang me up this afternoon. Must be some mistake.”

“Of course he isn’t dead,” said Mr. Oriel, with what in so mild a man was almost indignation. “How can he be dead if I am taking Horton’s funeral for him—the Bartons’ old butler, you know. He is going away for a few days’ much-needed change. Miss Sparling, this is most distressing, but I fear we shall have to put the party off till the following week.”

“You haven’t tried Saturday,” said Miss Holly.

“Miss Holly always sets us right,” said Miss Sparling, making Mrs. Belton think of Miss Trotwood and Mr. Dick. “Saturday then, Mr. Oriel, if it suits you.”

There was no impediment to Saturday, so the engagement was made, and the Perrys were to be bespoken. Miss Sparling then suggested that they might care to see her little apartment before going over to the school. Mr. Oriel, from a kind of delicacy, declined the first treat and remained in the sitting-room, talking with Miss Holly and Commander Belton. But the rest of the Belton family saw her neat bedroom, and the little room where Ellen Humble slept, both comfortable, both curiously lacking in personality.

“How do you manage about your bath water?” asked Mr. Belton, intent on practical things. “My father put a bath in when we used this as the bachelors’ wing, but there are about fifty yards of piping from the furnace and the water was never more than tepid. The second footman used to have to bring big cans of boiling water in the morning.”

“The Governors put in an electric heater for me,” said Miss Sparling, opening the bathroom door. “And they kindly put a little electric cooker in that sort of lobby and partitioned it off from the passage, which makes a nice little kitchen if I want to be independent.”

Mr. Belton saw, admired, and had a pang of envy for people who could afford these comforts. But he liked Miss Sparling and for her sake was willing to forgive the Hosiers their wealth.

The whole party then went along the covered arcade to the main building. In the hall a number of girls were talking or reading. Sounds as of ping-pong balls and a gramophone came from the drawing-room and morning-room. As the party came in, all the girls stood up.

“I have brought Mr. and Mrs. Belton, whose beautiful house you are living in, to see what we are doing,” said Miss Sparling, suddenly becoming quite a different person. “This is our head prefect, Mrs. Belton. She is sitting for a university scholarship and hopes to take up teaching. Miss Apperley, our games mistress; Miss Head, our literature mistress.”

She mentioned a few more names and dismissed the girls to their recreations with a graciousness that Elsa much admired and resolved to try to copy for the benefit of her juniors at the hush-hush job. Then she took Mrs. Belton up to look at the bedrooms, leaving the rest of the party to their own devices.

It is the duty of a Captain in one of His Majesty’s vessels of war to entertain at every port when cruising a number of people chiefly female whom he has never seen before, does not wish to see now and will probably never see again. But such is the discipline of the Royal Navy, that unless a Governor’s wife or a highly race-conscious local potentate is coming aboard, the Captain orders the Commander to carry on, while he himself goes riding, or bathing, or sits on an old friend’s veranda with long drinks.

So to Commander Belton a crowd of unknown women had no terrors and he chatted, as the Press so knowingly puts it, with mistresses and girls, bringing temporary devastation by his blue eyes and uniform and earning universal admiration by having lately had the head prefect’s brother serving as a midshipman under him. Emboldened by this discovery, the head prefect asked him if he liked dancing, and led him to the morning-room where he obligingly partnered one young lady after another.

Mr. Oriel begged Miss Holly to make his excuses to Miss Sparling and hurried off for the evening service. Charles, who despised dancing because he wouldn’t learn to dance, stood about looking handsomely awkward and sulky till Miss Holly in her universal competence took pity on him and talked to him about himself till he felt sufficiently at ease to talk about himself to her.

Presently his mother and Miss Sparling came back from their tour and they all went into the morning-room to look at the dancing. A tall lumpish girl with a pasty face was standing by the gramophone, changing the records.

“I think I remember that girl by the gramophone after church this morning,” said Mrs. Belton. “Isn’t she the one that dropped her prayer book?”

“It is Heather Adams,” said Miss Sparling. “She has been having horrid boils, poor child. Dr. Perry had to lance one for her and I am afraid she is starting another on her chin. Her father owns big works at Hogglestock and on the other side of Barchester and she is an only child. She is not a clever girl at most lessons but her mathematics are quite unusual.”

“Adams,” said Mr. Belton in rather too loud a voice. “That’s the man I was telling you about who sits on the bench with me. The one that——”

But Mrs. Belton, seeing that her husband was about to bring out some remark which might make the boil-afflicted Heather Adams uncomfortable, hurriedly spoke to her, saying she was so glad to see the girls dancing.

“We used to have balls in the long drawing-room,” she said, “but that was when the children were little. Do you like dancing, Heather?”

Heather, upon whose unfortunate chin the next boil was beginning to be but too apparent, said she didn’t mind it, but it was silly to dance with girls, and put on a fresh record.

Mrs. Belton fully sympathized with her young friend, but did not add that there was to one of her generation something almost disgraceful in the spectacle of girls dancing together because there were no men.

“Charles isn’t doing anything, my younger son that was at church with me this morning,” said Mrs. Belton. “He must dance with you. You have been putting on records for the others quite long enough. I’ll get him.”

But Charles, having caught his mother’s last words, took one look of terrified horror at Heather Adams and turning to Miss Holly said, “We might dance a bit. I’m not frightfully good, but it seems a pity not to.”

Miss Holly, who had for once not seen what was going on, owing to her attention being distracted by Isabella Ferdinand whose Sunday dress had split under one arm, did not realize the deliberate slight to Heather Adams, so remarking that it was his funeral, she seized Charles in her short but powerful arms and bounded away round the room with him like a hard indiarubber ball. Heather Adams’s pasty face was suffused with a dull flush and Mrs. Belton, for once quite at a loss, was annoyed with Charles’s selfishness and sorry for Heather who though unattractive had not deserved the snub. Commander Belton who had been recovering from a round with the Captain of Hockey, whose idea of dancing appeared to be to hack her partner’s shins with her feet as vigorously as she hacked her opponent’s leggings with her hockey stick, saw the whole tragi-comedy and thanking the Captain of Hockey warmly for her company, he moved to Heather Adams’s side and offering her his arm with a smile, for the noise of the gramophone and all the girls laughing and chattering made speech difficult, drew her into the dance. His kindness brought no particular reward. Heather Adams was a cumbrous armful, clumsy in her movements and so occupied by counting her steps under her breath that she was unable to answer the few polite remarks that her partner shouted into her ear.

Presently the gramophone ran down. Mrs. Belton gave her family a mother’s look to collect them. Commander Belton thanked Heather Adams, whose large face was now shiny as well as pasty, and rejoined his family. As they had left various coats and gloves and sticks in the West Pavilion, Miss Sparling said she would go back with them and let them out by her private door. Arrived in her apartment, she offered her guests some sherry in a very gentlemanly way. Mr. Belton’s admiration for her rose on finding that she had also a gentlemanly taste in wine and he congratulated her.

“I am glad it pleases you,” said Miss Sparling. “It belonged to my father. He had a small cellar but a very good one.”

This unexpected sidelight on Miss Sparling’s family made Mr. Belton, for no apparent reason except to bring shame upon his family, ask which university her father was at.

“He wasn’t at a university,” said Miss Sparling. “He was a wine merchant, but only in quite a small way.”

“But he had very good taste,” said Mr. Belton, vaguely feeling that by this tribute he could somehow make up to the late Mr. Sparling the want of a university education. “It’s a sherry anyone might be glad to have in his cellar.”

What Mr. Belton had set out to say was “any gentleman,” but had altered his phrase even as it left his mouth, though not quite so quickly but that Miss Sparling’s ear caught the hesitation.

“He was a very good father,” she said simply, “and devoted to my mother who was a clergyman’s daughter. They died when I was fifteen and my grandfather made me get scholarships and left me all his books. It all helps me in my work.”

“Your library do you mean?” said Elsa, much impressed by a woman who had made a career for herself by her own efforts.

“That of course,” said Miss Sparling. “But I really meant only being half a lady. You were asking about the girls here Mr. Belton,” she continued, addressing Charles who felt and looked very sheepish. “They are mostly much the same as I am, only they have wealthy families and not so many books. In London my girls came from good lower middle-class families, quite a lot of them well off in a quiet way. When we were evacuated down here and became a boarding school, the people who had got rich quickly in war business began to send their girls to us, like poor Heather Adams to whom Commander Belton was so kind.”

Commander Belton looked slightly confused. His mother mentally added another good mark to Miss Sparling’s score for realizing the nobility of Freddy’s behaviour. Mr. Belton began to look at Miss Sparling’s books, opening some and admiring their binding or their contents. It must be confessed that part of his interest was in the fly leaf, where he secretly hoped to find who Miss Sparling’s grandfather was, but most of them had evidently been bought at sales, for the inscriptions or the labels with coats of arms were varied. So pleasantly was the time passing with books and talk and sherry that Mrs. Belton almost jumped when she caught sight of the clock and realized that it was nearly seven. At that moment Dr. Perry came in.

“Good evening, everybody,” he said cheerfully. “I’ve just seen that Adams girl, Miss Sparling. I’m going to give her injections for those boils. Plaguey things they are. She looks better though. Not quite such a mass of gloom. Does she get enough exercise?”

“I can hardly say yet,” said Miss Sparling. “You see she came as a day girl while we were in Barchester. Miss Pettinger, who took a kind interest in the Hosiers’ Girls,” said Miss Sparling without any change in her voice or expression, “often used to tell me that they had not enough of the team spirit, by which I think she meant that they didn’t all play hockey. Certainly Heather didn’t if she could possibly get out of it, but she is so clumsy, poor thing, that games were really a torture to her.”

“Well, that’s neither here nor there,” said Dr. Perry, who had the lowest opinion of organized games for girls. “What else does she do? Does she go for walks?”

“I don’t know what she did at home,” said Miss Sparling, “but my games mistress is arranging walks and garden work and I will see that Heather gets out as much as possible.”

“Good,” said Dr. Perry, looking at his watch. “I must be off. Can I give any of you a lift, Mrs. Belton? It’s all quite legal, because I’m going home and can drop you at your door.”

Mrs. Belton gratefully accepted, for she was rather tired. The rest of her family went off by the field path.

“Well, what do you think of your tenant?” said Dr. Perry, whose curiosity about his friends was as boundless as his professional kindness and devotion. “Nice woman. A bit long in the tooth, but a fine upstanding figure. Quite a good lot of girls too. Not exactly out of the top drawer, but that’s all the better for them nowadays. Norman blood and all that doesn’t get you anywhere now. I’m sorry myself. My people are the ordinary run, not a bit of blue blood, but I’ve lived long enough to see that breeding tells. That woman, Miss Sparling, has breeding somewhere all right. Interesting study too. I look forward to seeing more of her.”

Mrs. Belton, who though humble had a secret pride in an unblemished Saxon ancestry as far as these things can be known, agreed with Dr. Perry on general lines, and said she and her husband were dining with Mr. Oriel on the following Saturday to meet Miss Sparling and understood that Dr. and Mrs. Perry were to be invited.

“Oh yes, I nearly killed Oriel outside the lychgate on my way up,” said Dr. Perry. “All his fault for not having those yews cut back. No one coming round the corner can see a thing. He told me about his dinner. I can’t come I’m sorry to say. I’ve got to meet Sir Abel Fillgrave at Barchester that evening. But my wife is going.”

Mrs. Belton was sorry to hear this. Not that she disliked Mrs. Perry, but that lady was given to enthusiasms and causes and apt to talk of nothing but the cause of the moment. She had just had a severe bout of Mixo-Lydianism, during which she had plagued all her friends with demands that they should buy rather dirty peasant embroidery or subscribe to a translation of the Mixo-Lydian national epic Gradkonski (so called from the mythical national hero Gradko and written in an old Mixo-Lydian verse of extreme obscurity). So Mrs. Belton said how nice it would be to see Mrs. Perry and how were the boys.

Dr. Perry said doing nicely. Bob was now House Physician at Knight’s, Jim had got the Smallbones Anatomical Medal, and Gus was doing a refresher course on Leprosy and Allied Diseases.

“ ‘Axis diseases, I hope, my boy,’ I said,” said Dr. Perry laughing heartily, so Mrs. Belton laughed heartily too.

Her medical man then told her most indiscreetly, but he knew his hearer well, some gossip from the Barchester General Hospital, and while he did so Mrs. Belton thanked her good fortune that the subject of Dr. Perry’s boys had dropped, for nice, hard-working boys as they were, she had always found it difficult to tell them apart as they seemed to have no distinguishing features and were practically all the same age, Bob being only fifteen months older than the twins, Jim and Gus. There had been a time, at the beginning of the war, when the fortunes of the Perry family had occupied the mind of Harefield to a considerable extent. All three boys had been destined by their father for a professional career, the word professional in his mind having no meaning but as applied to some branch of bodily healing. Bob had just finished his second year at Knight’s Hospital when war broke out and his brothers their first year. All three boys very naturally wished to join the Navy, Army or Air Force and be killed at once, but the authorities were not favourable, their father, a martinet in his own family and almost a worshipper of his calling, commanded, reasoned, and even pleaded. The boys submitted, and after a brief period of rebellion very unpleasant to the harassed authorities at Knight’s and to their parents when they came home, settled down and had done brilliantly. Jim and Gus were now full of hope of being sent abroad and Bob, after thinking the matter out, had decided that to be the youngest House Physician Knight’s had ever had, nearly made up for not having been killed or wounded. One or other was often down for a week-end or a night, but from the vantage of Harefield Park Mrs. Belton had been able to remain vague about their individuality. Now, an inhabitant of Harefield High Street, a tenant of her tenant, she must apply herself to memorizing somehow Bob’s slightly darker hair, Jim’s slightly longer nose and Gus’s bushier eyebrows. She sighed.

“You need a rest and a change,” said Dr. Perry, drawing up before Arcot House. “You can’t have either: no need to tell me. I’ll tell Potter to send you up something. Don’t forget to take it. Are you taking that glucose I told you to?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Belton with simple untruth, for that seemed the easier path.

“Where did you get it then?” said Dr. Perry. “I know for a fact that Potter slipped up on his last quota and was sold out the day it came in. Barchester?”

“Nowhere,” said Mrs. Belton, reduced by her medical man’s insistence to telling the truth. “I haven’t had any for three weeks. I said I had just to keep you quiet.”

“I knew you hadn’t,” said Dr. Perry, with a triumph that almost outweighed his annoyance with women who wouldn’t look after themselves. “Potter had his quota yesterday. I’ll tell him to send you some with the tonic.”

“I lost your prescription,” said Mrs. Belton meekly.

“No excuse,” said Dr. Perry. “Potter knows me well enough to give my patients what they ought to have first and get my prescription afterwards. He could retire any day on what he’s made out of my patients and the lipstick trade. Good night.”

He drove away and Mrs. Belton went into Arcot House. It felt small after the Park, but warm and friendly, and she gratefully went into the firelit drawing-room. A few moments later her husband came in.

“Nice afternoon,” he said. “If we can’t live at the Park, I’d sooner have those girls there than a lot of soldiers. Burn the house down as likely as not.”

With which unpatriotic but excusable remark he sat down and stretched his legs out to the blaze.

“Fred,” said his wife. “You know Miss Sparling took me over the house while you were watching the girls dancing.”

“Well,” said her husband, as she paused.

“What do you think she has done, Fred? She has locked my bedroom and says no one shall use it and she will see that it is kept aired. And if I ever want to come for a night, she says, I can go straight into it. I don’t suppose I’ll ever want to, but I must say it is extremely nice to think that it isn’t full of mistresses, or girls with boils.”

Before Mr. Belton could answer, their children came in with a turning-on of lights and some cheerful noise, so Mrs. Belton did not know what her husband would have said. He for his part was just as glad not to have to say anything, for though he would have loudly condemned his wife as sentimental, he was secretly much touched.

The visit of the Beltons was naturally the chief topic of conversation during supper at Harefield Park. Two parties had already formed. The one, headed by the head prefect whose brother had served under Commander Belton, could not sufficiently praise his eyes, his gold braid, his small-talk, and determined with one accord to marry him as soon as they left school. The other, which had for leader Miss Ferdinand, who had strong dramatic leanings and was a natural rebel, was already in a state of Byronic devotion to Charles, whose scowling manner and marked disinclination for their society had made an excellent effect.

At the mistresses’ table it was agreed that Mrs. Belton was charming; and, after a short pause, that Miss Belton was quite pretty, but rather vacant; this last adjective being the contribution of the science mistress who looked round proudly and almost cackled.

“Vacant? Pff!” said Miss Holly, suddenly charging into the conversation like a catapult. “Miss Belton has any amount of brains. Any amount. Too many perhaps. When we’ve got too many, we don’t marry.”

Her colleagues might have been tempted to find this remark offensive, but the tribute to their brains was flattering and they were used to Miss Holly’s brusque ways, so the matter dropped.

Miss Sparling, presiding at the High Table, managed to agree with everyone or at any rate to give the impression of agreement, and Miss Holly, as she often did, admired her employer’s gifts and wondered if anyone really knew her.

The case of Commander Belton v. Lieutenant Belton continued after supper and in the dormitories. In what had been the largest spare bedroom, Miss Ferdinand, in her pyjamas, with a green satin handkerchief sachet as a béret, gave a very good performance of Lieutenant Belton’s scowl, followed by a spirited impersonation of Commander Belton dancing with Heather Adams, represented by a bolster, in the middle of which Heather Adams came back from having her bath. The performance suddenly collapsed, for though no one had any particular liking for Heather, she was quiet and inoffensive enough and they were on the whole a good-natured set of girls. Heather, apparently unaware of what had been going on, brushed her scanty reddish hair and got into bed.

“If I was Commander Belton,” said a pretty, sharp-faced girl whose only claim to fame was that she had a schoolmaster brother who had been turned down medically for the Forces and loudly proclaimed himself a Conscientious Objector, “I wouldn’t stick at the Admiralty. I’d get sent to sea and do something; not have tea with typists.”

Her audience, taken aback by this sudden attack on their new idol, remained stupefied. Suddenly Heather Adams sat up in bed.

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “he was wounded three times and blown up in his ship and then he rowed about a hundred miles with the men he had saved and got them all back to England. Didn’t you see his ribbons?”

She then flounced down in her bed, turned over with her back to her friends and pulled the bedclothes over her head. The rest of the dormitory, silenced and impressed, went quickly to bed and were soon all asleep. Not so Heather, who after crying with silent rage under the blankets, presently came up to breathe. For at least half an hour after the others were asleep she lay awake thinking of Commander Belton. Her brief passion for Charles was utterly extinguished, killed by his brutality. Even the thought of a green béret, which between church and a quarter to six had given her a delightful feeling of going to be sick whenever it came to her mind, was now an idle dream. Its place was taken by a dark blue uniform, a kindly smile, a guiding arm, soothing conversation. That what she had told the girls was made up by her on the spur of the moment, in fact a lie, did not trouble her in the least. For his sake anything was excusable, and she would cheerfully do it again. If only she could die while saving Commander Belton’s life, she would be perfectly happy. Or even better, make a will leaving him all the money that she would one day inherit, and then die. Or perhaps come into the money quite soon and buy back (for she was ignorant of the business arrangements of the Hosiers’ Company) Harefield Park for him, give it to him on the day of his wedding to a very beautiful aristocrat, and then go into a nunnery and die. This arrangement, to be followed by her burial in Harefield church and periodical visits of Commander Belton and his beautiful wife to her humble tombstone, gave her such pleasure that she sleepily elaborated it till deep slumber claimed her for its own.