Читать книгу Collected Works - Джордж Оруэлл, George Orwell - Страница 47

“I hope you’re fond of fried eggs for your breakfast?” went on Mrs. Creevy.

Dorothy hastened to assure her that she was very fond of fried eggs.

“Well, that’s a good thing, because you’ll always have to have the same as what I have. So I hope you’re not going to be what I call dainty about your food. I always think,” she added, picking up her knife and fork, “that a fried egg tastes a lot better if you cut it well up before you eat it.”

She sliced the two eggs into thin strips, and then served them in such a way that Dorothy received about two thirds of an egg. With some difficulty Dorothy spun out her fraction of egg so as to make half a dozen mouthfuls of it, and then, when she had taken a slice of bread and butter, she could not help glancing hopefully in the direction of the dish of marmalade. But Mrs. Creevy was sitting with her lean left arm—not exactly round the marmalade, but in a protective position on its left flank, as though she suspected that Dorothy was going to make an attack upon it. Dorothy’s nerve failed her, and she had no marmalade that morning—nor, indeed, for many mornings to come.

Mrs. Creevy did not speak again during breakfast, but presently the sound of feet on the gravel outside, and of squeaky voices in the schoolroom, announced that the girls were beginning to arrive. They came in by a side door that was left open for them. Mrs. Creevy got up from the table and banged the breakfast things together on the tray. She was one of those women who can never move anything without banging it about; she was as full of thumps and raps as a poltergeist. Dorothy carried the tray into the kitchen, and when she returned Mrs. Creevy produced a penny notebook from a drawer in the dresser and laid it open on the table.

“Just take a look at this,” she said. “Here’s a list of the girls’ names that I’ve got ready for you. I shall want you to know the whole lot of them by this evening.” She wetted her thumb and turned over three pages: “Now, do you see these three lists here?”

“Yes,” said Dorothy.

“Well, you’ll just have to learn those three lists by heart, and make sure you know what girls are on which. Because I don’t want you to go thinking that all the girls are to be treated alike. They aren’t—not by a long way, they aren’t. Different girls, different treatment—that’s my system. Now, do you see this lot on the first page?”

“Yes,” said Dorothy again.

“Well, the parents of that lot are what I call the good payers. You know what I mean by that? They’re the ones that pay cash on the nail and no jibbing at an extra half guinea or so now and again. You’re not to smack any of that lot, not on any account. This lot over here are the medium payers. Their parents do pay up sooner or later, but you don’t get the money out of them without you worry them for it night and day. You can smack that lot if they get saucy, but don’t go and leave a mark their parents can see. If you’ll take my advice, the best thing with children is to twist their ears. Have you ever tried that?”

“No,” said Dorothy.

“Well, I find it answers better than anything. It doesn’t leave a mark, and the children can’t bear it. Now these three over here are the bad payers. Their fathers are two terms behind already, and I’m thinking of a solicitor’s letter. I don’t care what you do to that lot—well, short of a police court case, naturally. Now, shall I take you in and start you with the girls? You’d better bring that book along with you, and just keep your eye on it all the time so as there’ll be no mistakes.”

They went into the schoolroom. It was a largish room, with grey-papered walls that were made yet greyer by the dullness of the light, for the heavy laurel bushes outside choked the windows, and no direct ray of the sun ever penetrated into the room. There was a teacher’s desk by the empty fireplace, and there were a dozen small double desks, a light blackboard, and, on the mantelpiece, a black clock that looked like a miniature mausoleum; but there were no maps, no pictures, nor even, as far as Dorothy could see, any books. The sole objects in the room that could be called ornamental were two sheets of black paper pinned to the walls, with writing on them in chalk in beautiful copperplate. On one was “Speech is Silver. Silence is Golden,” and on the other, “Punctuality is the Politeness of Princes.”

The girls, twenty-one of them, were already sitting at their desks. They had grown very silent when they heard footsteps approaching, and as Mrs. Creevy came in they seemed to shrink down in their places like partridge chicks when a hawk is soaring. For the most part they were dull-looking, lethargic children with bad complexions, and adenoids seemed to be remarkably common among them. The eldest of them might have been fifteen years old, the youngest was hardly more than a baby. The school had no uniform, and one or two of the children were verging on raggedness.

“Stand up, girls,” said Mrs. Creevy as she reached the teacher’s desk. “We’ll start off with the morning prayer.”

The girls stood up, clasped their hands in front of them, and shut their eyes. They repeated the prayer in unison, in weak piping voices, Mrs. Creevy leading them, her sharp eyes darting over them all the while to see that they were attending.

“Almighty and everlasting Father,” they piped, “we beseech Thee that our studies this day may be graced by Thy divine guidance. Make us to conduct ourselves quietly and obediently; look down upon our school and make it to prosper, so that it may grow in numbers and be a good example to the neighbourhood and not a disgrace like some schools of which Thou knowest, O Lord. Make us, we beseech Thee, O Lord, industrious, punctual and ladylike, and worthy in all possible respects to walk in Thy ways: for Jesus Christ’s sake, our Lord, Amen.”

This prayer was of Mrs. Creevy’s own composition. When they had finished it, the girls repeated the Lord’s Prayer, and then sat down.

“Now, girls,” said Mrs. Creevy, “this is your new teacher, Miss Millborough. As you know, Miss Strong had to leave us all of a sudden after she was taken so bad in the middle of the arithmetic lesson; and I can tell you I’ve had a hard week of it looking for a new teacher. I had seventy-three applications before I took on Miss Millborough, and I had to refuse them all because their qualifications weren’t high enough. Just you remember and tell your parents that, all of you—seventy-three applications! Well, Miss Millborough is going to take you in Latin, French, history, geography, mathematics, English literature and composition, spelling, grammar, handwriting and freehand drawing; and Mr. Booth will take you in chemistry as usual on Thursday afternoons. Now, what’s the first lesson on your time-table this morning?”

“History, Ma’am,” piped one or two voices.

“Very well. I expect Miss Millborough’ll start off by asking you a few questions about the history you’ve been learning. So just you do your best, all of you, and let her see that all the trouble we’ve taken over you hasn’t been wasted. You’ll find they can be quite a sharp lot of girls when they try, Miss Millborough.”

“I’m sure they are,” said Dorothy.

“Well, I’ll be leaving you, then. And just you behave yourselves, girls! Don’t you get trying it on with Miss Millborough like you did with Miss Brewer, because I warn you she won’t stand it. If I hear any noise coming from this room, there’ll be trouble for somebody.”

She gave a glance round which included Dorothy and indeed suggested that Dorothy would probably be the “somebody” referred to, and departed.

Dorothy faced the class. She was not afraid of them—she was too used to dealing with children ever to be afraid of them—but she did feel a momentary qualm. The sense of being an impostor (what teacher has not felt it at times?) was heavy upon her. It suddenly occurred to her, what she had only been dimly aware of before, that she had taken this teaching job under flagrantly false pretences, without having any kind of qualification for it. The subject she was now supposed to be teaching was history, and, like most “educated” people, she knew virtually no history. How awful, she thought, if it turned out that these girls knew more history than she did! She said tentatively:

“What period exactly were you doing with Miss Strong?”

Nobody answered. Dorothy saw the older girls exchanging glances, as though asking one another whether it was safe to say anything, and finally deciding not to commit themselves.

“Well, whereabouts had you got to?” she said, wondering whether perhaps the word “period” was too much for them.

Again no answer.

“Well, now, surely you remember something about it? Tell me the names of some of the people you were learning about in your last history lesson.”

More glances were exchanged, and a very plain little girl in the front row, in a brown jumper and skirt, with her hair screwed into two tight pigtails, remarked cloudily, “It was about the Ancient Britons.” At this two other girls took courage, and answered simultaneously. One of them said “Columbus,” and the other “Napoleon.”

Somehow, after that, Dorothy seemed to see her way more clearly. It was obvious that instead of being uncomfortably knowledgeable as she had feared, the class knew as nearly as possible no history at all. With this discovery her stage-fright vanished. She grasped that before she could do anything else with them it was necessary to find out what, if anything, these children knew. So, instead of following the time-table, she spent the rest of the morning in questioning the entire class on each subject in turn; when she had finished with history (and it took about five minutes to get to the bottom of their historical knowledge) she tried them with geography, with English grammar, with French, with arithmetic—with everything, in fact, that they were supposed to have learned. By twelve o’clock she had plumbed, though not actually explored, the frightful abysses of their ignorance.

For they knew nothing, absolutely nothing—nothing, nothing, nothing, like the Dadaists. It was appalling that even children could be so ignorant. There were only two girls in the class who knew whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth, and not a single one of them could tell Dorothy who was the last king before George V, or who wrote Hamlet, or what was meant by a vulgar fraction, or which ocean you crossed to get to America, the Atlantic or the Pacific. And the big girls of fifteen were not much better than the tiny infants of eight, except that the former could at least read consecutively and write neat copperplate. That was the one thing that nearly all of the older girls could do—they could write neatly. Mrs. Creevy had seen to that. And of course, here and there in the midst of their ignorance, there were small, disconnected islets of knowledge; for example, some odd stanzas from “pieces of poetry” that they had learned by heart, and a few Ollendorffian French sentences such as “Passez-moi le beurre, s’il vous plaît” and “Le fils du jardinier a perdu son chapeau,” which they appeared to have learned as a parrot learns “Pretty Poll.” As for their arithmetic, it was a little better than the other subjects. Most of them knew how to add and subtract, about half of them had some notion of how to multiply, and there were even three or four who had struggled as far as long division. But that was the utmost limit of their knowledge; and beyond, in every direction, lay utter, impenetrable night.

Moreover, not only did they know nothing, but they were so unused to being questioned that it was often difficult to get answers out of them at all. It was obvious that whatever they knew they had learned in an entirely mechanical manner, and they could only gape in a sort of dull bewilderment when asked to think for themselves. However, they did not seem unwilling, and evidently they had made up their minds to be “good”—children are always “good” with a new teacher; and Dorothy persisted, and by degrees the children grew, or seemed to grow, a shade less lumpish. She began to pick up, from the answers they gave her, a fairly accurate notion of what Miss Strong’s régime had been like.

It appeared that, though theoretically they had learned all the usual school subjects, the only ones that had been at all seriously taught were handwriting and arithmetic. Mrs. Creevy was particularly keen on handwriting. And besides this they had spent great quantities of time—an hour or two out of every day, it seemed—in drudging through a dreadful routine called “copies.” “Copies” meant copying things out of text-books or off the blackboard. Miss Strong would write up, for example, some sententious little “essay” (there was an essay entitled “Spring” which recurred in all the older girls’ books, and which began, “Now, when girlish April is tripping through the land, when the birds are chanting gaily on the boughs and the dainty flowerets bursting from their buds,” etc., etc.), and the girls would make fair copies of it in their copybooks; and the parents, to whom the copybooks were shown from time to time, were no doubt suitably impressed. Dorothy began to grasp that everything that the girls had been taught was in reality aimed at the parents. Hence the “copies,” the insistence on handwriting, and the parroting of ready-made French phrases; they were cheap and easy ways of creating an impression. Meanwhile, the little girls at the bottom of the class seemed barely able to read and write, and one of them—her name was Mavis Williams, and she was a rather sinister-looking child of eleven, with eyes too far apart—could not even count. This child seemed to have done nothing at all during the past term and a half except to write pothooks. She had quite a pile of books filled with pothooks—page after page of pothooks, looping on and on like the mangrove roots in some tropical swamp.

Dorothy tried not to hurt the children’s feelings by exclaiming at their ignorance, but in her heart she was amazed and horrified. She had not known that schools of this description still existed in the civilised world. The whole atmosphere of the place was so curiously antiquated—so reminiscent of those dreary little private schools that you read about in Victorian novels. As for the few text-books that the class possessed, you could hardly look at them without feeling as though you had stepped back into the mid-nineteenth century. There were only three text-books of which each child had a copy. One was a shilling arithmetic, pre-War but fairly serviceable, and another was a horrid little book called The Hundred Page History of Britain—a nasty little duodecimo book with a gritty brown cover, and, for frontispiece, a portrait of Boadicea with a Union Jack draped over the front of her chariot. Dorothy opened this book at random, came to page 91, and read:

“After the French Revolution was over, the self-styled Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte attempted to set up his sway, but though he won a few victories against continental troops, he soon found that in the ‘thin red line’ he had more than met his match. Conclusions were tried upon the field of Waterloo, where 50,000 Britons put to flight 70,000 Frenchmen—for the Prussians, our allies, arrived too late for the battle. With a ringing British cheer our men charged down the slope and the enemy broke and fled. We now come on to the great Reform Bill of 1832, the first of those beneficent reforms which have made British liberty what it is and marked us off from the less fortunate nations,” etc., etc.

The date of the book was 1888. Dorothy, who had never seen a history book of this description before, examined it with a feeling approaching horror. There was also an extraordinary little “reader,” dated 1863. It consisted mostly of bits out of Fenimore Cooper, Dr. Watts and Lord Tennyson, and at the end there were the queerest little “Nature Notes” with woodcut illustrations. There would be a woodcut of an elephant, and underneath in small print: “The Elephant is a sagacious beast. He rejoices in the shade of the Palm Trees, and though stronger than six horses he will allow a little child to lead him. His food is Bananas.” And so on to the Whale, the Zebra, the Porcupine and the Spotted Camelopard. There were also, in the teacher’s desk, a copy of Beautiful Joe, a forlorn book called Peeps at Distant Lands, and a French phrase-book dated 1891. It was called All you will need on your Parisian Trip, and the first phrase given was “Lace my stays, but not too tightly.” In the whole room there was not such a thing as an atlas or a set of geometrical instruments.

At eleven there was a break of ten minutes, and some of the girls played dull little games at noughts and crosses or quarrelled over pencil-cases, and a few who had got over their first shyness clustered round Dorothy’s desk and talked to her. They told her some more about Miss Strong and her methods of teaching, and how she used to twist their ears when they made blots on their copybooks. It appeared that Miss Strong had been a very strict teacher except when she was “taken bad,” which happened about twice a week. And when she was taken bad she used to drink some medicine out of a little brown bottle, and after drinking it she would grow quite jolly for a while and talk to them about her brother in Canada. But on her last day—the time when she was taken so bad during the arithmetic lesson—the medicine seemed to make her worse than ever, because she had no sooner drunk it than she began singing and fell across a desk, and Mrs. Creevy had to carry her out of the room.

After the break there was another period of three-quarters of an hour, and then school ended for the morning. Dorothy felt stiff and tired after three hours in the chilly but stuffy room, and she would have liked to go out of doors for a breath of fresh air, but Mrs. Creevy had told her beforehand that she must come and help get dinner ready. The girls who lived near the school mostly went home for dinner, but there were seven who had dinner in the “morning-room” at ten-pence a time. It was an uncomfortable meal, and passed in almost complete silence, for the girls were frightened to talk under Mrs. Creevy’s eye. The dinner was stewed scrag end of mutton, and Mrs. Creevy showed extraordinary dexterity in serving the pieces of lean to the “good payers” and the pieces of fat to the “medium payers.” As for the three “bad payers,” they ate a shamefaced lunch out of paper bags in the schoolroom.

School began again at two o’clock. Already, after only one morning’s teaching, Dorothy went back to her work with secret shrinking and dread. She was beginning to realise what her life would be like, day after day and week after week, in that sunless room, trying to drive the rudiments of knowledge into unwilling brats. But when she had assembled the girls and called their names over, one of them, a little peaky child with mouse-coloured hair, called Laura Firth, came up to her desk and presented her with a pathetic bunch of brawny-yellow chrysanthemums, “from all of us.” The girls had taken a liking to Dorothy, and had subscribed fourpence among themselves, to buy her a bunch of flowers.

Something stirred in Dorothy’s heart as she took the ugly flowers. She looked with more seeing eyes than before at the anæmic faces and shabby clothes of the children, and was all of a sudden horribly ashamed to think that in the morning she had looked at them with indifference, almost with dislike. Now, a profound pity took possession of her. The poor children, the poor children! How they had been stunted and maltreated! And with it all they had retained the childish gentleness that could make them squander their few pennies on flowers for their teacher.

She felt quite differently towards her job from that moment onwards. A feeling of loyalty and affection had sprung up in her heart. This school was her school; she would work for it and be proud of it, and make every effort to turn it from a place of bondage into a place human and decent. Probably it was very little that she could do. She was so inexperienced and unfitted for her job that she must educate herself before she could even begin to educate anybody else. Still, she would do her best; she would do whatever willingness and energy could do to rescue these children from the horrible darkness in which they had been kept.

§III

During the next few weeks there were two things that occupied Dorothy to the exclusion of all others. One, getting her class into some kind of order; the other, establishing a concordat with Mrs. Creevy.

The second of the two was by a great deal the more difficult. Mrs. Creevy’s house was as vile a house to live in as one could possibly imagine. It was always more or less cold, there was not a comfortable chair in it from top to bottom, and the food was disgusting. Teaching is harder work than it looks, and a teacher needs good food to keep him going. It was horribly dispiriting to have to work on a diet of tasteless mutton stews, damp boiled potatoes full of little black eyeholes, watery rice puddings, bread and scrape and weak tea—and never enough even of these. Mrs. Creevy, who was mean enough to take a pleasure in skimping even her own food, ate much the same meals as Dorothy, but she always had the lion’s share of them. Every morning at breakfast the two fried eggs were sliced up and unequally partitioned, and the dish of marmalade remained for ever sacrosanct. Dorothy grew hungrier and hungrier as the term went on. On the two evenings a week when she managed to get out of doors she dipped into her dwindling store of money and bought slabs of plain chocolate, which she ate in the deepest secrecy—for Mrs. Creevy, though she starved Dorothy more or less intentionally, would have been mortally offended if she had known that she bought food for herself.

The worst thing about Dorothy’s position was that she had no privacy and very little time that she could call her own. Once school was over for the day her only refuge was the “morning-room,” where she was under Mrs. Creevy’s eye, and Mrs. Creevy’s leading idea was that Dorothy must never be left in peace for ten minutes together. She had taken it into her head, or pretended to do so, that Dorothy was an idle person who needed keeping up to the mark. And so it was always, “Well, Miss Millborough, you don’t seem to have very much to do this evening, do you? Aren’t there some exercise books that want correcting? Or why don’t you get your needle and do a bit of sewing? I’m sure I couldn’t bear to just sit in my chair doing nothing like you do!” She was for ever finding household jobs for Dorothy to do, even making her scrub the schoolroom floor on Saturday mornings when the girls did not come to school; but this was done out of pure ill nature, for she did not trust Dorothy to do the work properly, and generally did it again after her. One evening Dorothy was unwise enough to bring back a novel from the public library. Mrs. Creevy flared up at the very sight of it. “Well, really, Miss Millborough! I shouldn’t have thought you’d have had time to read!” she said bitterly. She herself had never read a book right through in her life, and was proud of it.

Moreover, even when Dorothy was not actually under her eye, Mrs. Creevy had ways of making her presence felt. She was for ever prowling in the neighbourhood of the schoolroom, so that Dorothy never felt quite safe from her intrusion; and when she thought there was too much noise she would suddenly rap on the wall with her broom handle in a way that made the children jump and put them off their work. At all hours of the day she was restlessly, noisily active. When she was not cooking meals she was banging about with broom and dustpan, or harrying the charwoman, or pouncing down upon the schoolroom to “have a look round” in hopes of catching Dorothy or the children up to mischief, or “doing a bit of gardening”—that is, mutilating with a pair of shears the unhappy little shrubs that grew amid wastes of gravel in the back garden. On only two evenings a week was Dorothy free of her, and that was when Mrs. Creevy sallied forth on forays which she called “going after the girls”; that is to say, canvassing likely parents. These evenings Dorothy usually spent in the public library, for when Mrs. Creevy was not at home she expected Dorothy to keep out of the house, to save fire and gaslight. On other evenings Mrs. Creevy was busy writing dunning letters to the parents, or letters to the editor of the local paper, haggling over the price of a dozen advertisements, or poking about in the girls’ desks to see that their exercise books had been properly corrected, or “doing a bit of sewing.” Whenever occupation failed her for even five minutes she got out her workbox and “did a bit of sewing”—generally restitching some bloomers of harsh white linen of which she had pairs beyond number. They were the most chilly-looking garments that one could possibly imagine; they seemed to carry upon them, as no nun’s coif or anchorite’s hair shirt could ever have done, the impress of a frozen and awful chastity. The sight of them set you wondering about the late Mr. Creevy, even to the point of wondering whether he had ever existed.

Looking with an outsider’s eye at Mrs. Creevy’s manner of life, you would have said that she had no pleasures whatever. She never did any of the things that ordinary people do to amuse themselves—never went to the pictures, never looked at a book, never ate sweets, never cooked a special dish for dinner or dressed herself in any kind of finery. Social life meant absolutely nothing to her. She had no friends, was probably incapable of imagining such a thing as friendship, and hardly ever exchanged a word with a fellow-being except on business. Of religious belief she had not the smallest vestige. Her attitude towards religion, though she went to the Baptist Chapel every Sunday to impress the parents with her piety, was a mean anticlericalism founded on the notion that the clergy are “only after your money.” She seemed a creature utterly joyless, utterly submerged by the dullness of her existence. But in reality it was not so. There were several things from which she derived acute and inexhaustible pleasure.

For instance, there was her avarice over money. It was the leading interest of her life. There are two kinds of avaricious person—the bold, grasping type who will ruin you if he can, but who never looks twice at twopence, and the petty miser who has not the enterprise actually to make money, but who will always, as the saying goes, take a farthing from a dunghill with his teeth. Mrs. Creevy belonged to the second type. By ceaseless canvassing and impudent bluff she had worked her school up to twenty-one pupils, but she would never get it much further, because she was too mean to spend money on the necessary equipment and to pay proper wages to her assistant. The fees the girls paid, or didn’t pay, were five guineas a term with certain extras, so that, starve and sweat her assistant as she might, she could hardly hope to make more than a hundred and fifty pounds a year clear profit. But she was fairly satisfied with that. It meant more to her to save sixpence than to earn a pound. So long as she could think of a way of docking Dorothy’s dinner of another potato, or getting her exercise books a halfpenny a dozen cheaper, or shoving an unauthorised half guinea on to one of the “good payers’ ” bills, she was happy after her fashion.

And again, in pure, purposeless malignity—in petty acts of spite, even when there was nothing to be gained by them—she had a hobby of which she never wearied. She was one of those people who experience a kind of spiritual orgasm when they manage to do somebody else a bad turn. Her feud with Mr. Boulger next door—a one-sided affair, really, for poor Mr. Boulger was not up to Mrs. Creevy’s fighting weight—was conducted ruthlessly, with no quarter given or expected. So keen was Mrs. Creevy’s pleasure in scoring off Mr. Boulger that she was even willing to spend money on it occasionally. A year ago Mr. Boulger had written to the landlord (each of them was for ever writing to the landlord, complaining about the other’s behaviour) to say that Mrs. Creevy’s kitchen chimney smoked into his back windows, and would she please have it heightened two feet. The very day the landlord’s letter reached her, Mrs. Creevy called in the bricklayers and had the chimney lowered two feet. It cost her thirty shillings, but it was worth it. After that there had been the long guerrilla campaign of throwing things over the garden wall during the night, and Mrs. Creevy had finally won with a dustbinful of wet ashes thrown on to Mr. Boulger’s bed of tulips. As it happened, Mrs. Creevy won a neat and bloodless victory soon after Dorothy’s arrival. Discovering by chance that the roots of Mr. Boulger’s plum tree had grown under the wall into her own garden, she promptly injected a whole tin of weed-killer into them and killed the tree. This was remarkable as being the only occasion when Dorothy ever heard Mrs. Creevy laugh.

But Dorothy was too busy, at first, to pay much attention to Mrs. Creevy and her nasty characteristics. She saw quite clearly that Mrs. Creevy was an odious woman and that her own position was virtually that of a slave; but it did not greatly worry her. Her work was too absorbing, too all-important. In comparison with it, her own comfort and even her future hardly seemed to matter.

It did not take her more than a couple of days to get her class into running order. It was curious, but though she had no experience of teaching and no preconceived theories about it, yet from the very first day she found herself, as though by instinct, rearranging, scheming, innovating. There was so much that was crying out to be done. The first thing, obviously, was to get rid of the grisly routine of “copies,” and after Dorothy’s second day no more “copies” were done in the class, in spite of a sniff or two from Mrs. Creevy. The handwriting lessons, also, were cut down. Dorothy would have liked to do away with handwriting lessons altogether so far as the older girls were concerned—it seemed to her ridiculous that girls of fifteen should waste time in practising copperplate—but Mrs. Creevy would not hear of it. She seemed to attach an almost superstitious value to handwriting lessons. And the next thing, of course, was to scrap the repulsive Hundred Page History and the preposterous little “readers.” It would have been worse than useless to ask Mrs. Creevy to buy new books for the children, but on her first Saturday afternoon Dorothy begged leave to go up to London, was grudgingly given it, and spent two pounds three shillings out of her precious four pounds ten on a dozen secondhand copies of a cheap school edition of Shakespeare, a big secondhand atlas, some volumes of Hans Andersen’s stories for the younger children, a set of geometrical instruments and two pounds of plasticine. With these, and history books out of the public library, she felt that she could make a start.

She had seen at a glance that what the children most needed, and what they had never had, was individual attention. So she began by dividing them up into three separate classes, and so arranging things that two lots could be working by themselves while she “went through” something with the third. It was difficult at first, especially with the younger girls, whose attention wandered as soon as they were left to themselves, so that you could never really take your eyes off them. And yet how wonderfully, how unexpectedly, nearly all of them improved during those first few weeks! For the most part they were not really stupid, only dazed by a dull, mechanical rigmarole. For a week, perhaps, they continued unteachable; and then, quite suddenly, their warped little minds seemed to spring up and expand like daisies when you move the garden roller off them.

Quite quickly and easily Dorothy broke them in to the habit of thinking for themselves. She got them to make up essays out of their own heads instead of copying out drivel about the birds chanting on the boughs and the flowerets bursting from their buds. She attacked their arithmetic at the foundations and started the little girls on multiplication and piloted the older ones through long division to fractions; she even got three of them to the point where there was talk of starting on decimals. She taught them the first rudiments of French grammar in place of “Passez-moi le beurre, s’il vous plaît” and “Le fils du jardinier a perdu son chapeau.” Finding that not a girl in the class knew what any of the countries of the world looked like (though several of them knew that Quito was the capital of Ecuador), she set them to making a large contour-map of Europe in plasticine, on a piece of three-ply wood, copying it in scale from the atlas. The children adored making the map; they were always clamouring to be allowed to go on with it. And she started the whole class, except the six youngest girls and Mavis Williams, the pothook specialist, on reading Macbeth. Not a child among them had ever voluntarily read anything in her life before, except perhaps the Girl’s Own Paper; but they took readily to Shakespeare, as all children do when he is not made horrible with parsing and analysing.

History was the hardest thing to teach them. Dorothy had not realised till now how hard it is for children who come from poor homes to have even a conception of what history means. Every upper-class person, however ill-informed, grows up with some notion of history; he can visualise a Roman centurion, a mediæval knight, an eighteenth-century nobleman; the terms Antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Industrial Revolution evoke some meaning, even if a confused one, in his mind. But these children came from bookless homes and from parents who would have laughed at the notion that the past has any meaning for the present. They had never heard of Robin Hood, never played at being Cavaliers and Roundheads, never wondered who built the English churches or what Fid. Def. on a penny stands for. There were just two historical characters of whom all of them, almost without exception, had heard, and those were Columbus and Napoleon. Heaven knows why—perhaps Columbus and Napoleon get into the newspapers a little oftener than most historical characters. They seemed to have swelled up in the children’s minds, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, till they blocked out the whole landscape of the past. Asked when motor-cars were invented, one child, aged ten, vaguely hazarded, “About a thousand years ago, by Columbus.”

Some of the older girls, Dorothy discovered, had been through the Hundred Page History as many as four times, from Boadicea to the first Jubilee, and forgotten practically every word of it. Not that that mattered greatly, for most of it was lies. She started the whole class over again at Julius Cæsar’s invasion, and at first she tried taking history books out of the public library and reading them aloud to the children; but that method failed, because they could understand nothing that was not explained to them in words of one or two syllables. So she did what she could in her own words and with her own inadequate knowledge, making a sort of paraphrase of what she read and delivering it to the children; striving all the while to drive into their dull little minds some picture of the past, and what was always more difficult, some interest in it. But one day a brilliant idea struck her. She bought a roll of cheap plain wallpaper at an upholsterer’s shop, and set the children to making an historical chart. They marked the roll of paper into centuries and years, and stuck scraps that they cut out of illustrated papers—pictures of knights in armour and Spanish galleons and printing presses and railway trains—at the appropriate places. Pinned round the walls of the room, the chart presented, as the scraps grew in number, a sort of panorama of English history. The children were even fonder of the chart than of the contour map. They always, Dorothy found, showed more intelligence when it was a question of making something instead of merely learning. There was even talk of making a contour map of the world, four feet by four, in papier mâché, if Dorothy could “get round” Mrs. Creevy to allow the preparation of the papier mâché—a messy process needing buckets of water.

Mrs. Creevy watched Dorothy’s innovations with a jealous eye, but she did not interfere actively at first. She was not going to show it, of course, but she was secretly amazed and delighted to find that she had got hold of an assistant who was actually willing to work. When she saw Dorothy spending her own money on text-books for the children, it gave her the same delicious sensation that she would have had in bringing off a successful swindle. She did, however, sniff and grumble at everything that Dorothy did, and she wasted a great deal of time by insisting on what she called “thorough correction” of the girls’ exercise books. But her system of correction, like everything else in the school curriculum, was arranged with one eye on the parents. Periodically the children took their books home for their parents’ inspection, and Mrs. Creevy would never allow anything disparaging to be written in them. Nothing was to be marked “bad” or crossed out or too heavily underlined; instead, in the evenings, Dorothy decorated the books, under Mrs. Creevy’s dictation, with more or less applauding comments in red ink. “A very creditable performance,” and “Excellent! You are making great strides. Keep it up!” were Mrs. Creevy’s favourites. All the children in the school, apparently, were for ever “making great strides”; in what direction they were striding was not stated. The parents, however, seemed willing to swallow an almost unlimited amount of this kind of thing.

There were times, of course, when Dorothy had trouble with the girls themselves. The fact that they were all of different ages made them difficult to deal with, and though they were fond of her and were very “good” with her at first, they would not have been children at all if they had been invariably “good”. Sometimes they were lazy and sometimes they succumbed to that most damnable vice of schoolgirls—giggling. For the first few days Dorothy was greatly exercised over little Mavis Williams, who was stupider than one would have believed it possible for any child of eleven to be. Dorothy could do nothing with her at all. At the first attempt to get her to do anything beyond pothooks a look of almost subhuman blankness would come into her wide-set eyes. Sometimes, however, she had talkative fits in which she would ask the most amazing and unanswerable questions. For instance, she would open her “reader,” find one of the illustrations—the sagacious Elephant, perhaps—and ask Dorothy:

“Please, Miss, wass ’at thing there?” (She mispronounced her words in a curious manner.)

“That’s an elephant, Mavis.”

“Wass a elephant?”

“An elephant’s a kind of wild animal.”

“Wass a animal?”

“Well—a dog’s an animal.”

“Wass a dog?”

And so on, more or less indefinitely. About half-way through the fourth morning Mavis held up her hand and said with a sly politeness that ought to have put Dorothy on her guard:

“Please, Miss, may I be ’scused?”

“Yes,” said Dorothy.

One of the bigger girls put up her hand, blushed, and put her hand down again as though too bashful to speak. On being prompted by Dorothy, she said shamefacedly:

“Please, Miss, Miss Strong didn’t used to let Mavis go to the lavatory alone. She locks herself in and won’t come out, and then Mrs. Creevy gets angry, Miss.”

Dorothy dispatched a messenger, but it was too late. Mavis remained in latebra pudenda till twelve o’clock. Afterwards, Mrs. Creevy explained privately to Dorothy that Mavis was a congenital idiot—or, as she put it, “not right in the head.” It was totally impossible to teach her anything. Of course, Mrs. Creevy didn’t “let on” to Mavis’s parents, who believed that their child was only “backward” and paid their fees regularly. Mavis was quite easy to deal with. You just had to give her a book and a pencil and tell her to draw pictures and be quiet. But Mavis, a child of habit, drew nothing but pothooks—remaining quiet and apparently happy for hours together, with her tongue hanging out, amid festoons of pothooks.

But in spite of these minor difficulties, how well everything went during those first few weeks! How ominously well, indeed! About the tenth of November, after much grumbling about the price of coal, Mrs. Creevy started to allow a fire in the schoolroom. The children’s wits brightened noticeably when the room was decently warm. And there were happy hours, sometimes, when the fire crackled in the grate, and Mrs. Creevy was out of the house, and the children were working quietly and absorbedly at one of the lessons that were their favourities. Best of all was when the two top classes were reading Macbeth, the girls squeaking breathlessly through the scenes, and Dorothy pulling them up to make them pronounce the words properly and to tell them who Bellona’s bridegroom was and how witches rode on broomsticks; and the girls wanting to know, almost as excitedly as though it had been a detective story, how Birnam Wood could possibly come to Dunsinane and Macbeth be killed by a man who was not of woman born. Those are the times that make teaching worth while—the times when the children’s enthusiasm leaps up, like an answering flame, to meet your own, and sudden unlooked-for gleams of intelligence reward your earlier drudgery. No job is more fascinating than teaching if you have a free hand at it. Nor did Dorothy know, as yet, that that “if” is one of the biggest “ifs” in the world.

Her job suited her, and she was happy in it. She knew the minds of the children intimately by this time, knew their individual peculiarities and the special stimulants that were needed before you could get them to think. She was more fond of them, more interested in their development, more anxious to do her best for them, than she would have conceived possible a short while ago. The complex, never-ended labour of teaching filled her life just as the round of parish jobs had filled it at home. She thought and dreamed of teaching; she took books out of the public library and studied theories of education. She felt that quite willingly she would go on teaching all her life, even at ten shillings a week and her keep, if it could always be like this. It was her vocation, she thought.

Almost any job that fully occupied her would have been a relief after the horrible futility of the time of her destitution. But this was more than a mere job; it was—so it seemed to her—a mission, a life-purpose. Trying to awaken the dulled minds of these children, trying to undo the swindle that had been worked upon them in the name of education—that, surely, was something to which she could give herself heart and soul? So for the time being, in the interest of her work, she disregarded the beastliness of living in Mrs. Creevy’s house, and quite forgot her strange, anomalous position and the uncertainty of her future.

§IV

But of course, it could not last.

Not many weeks had gone by before the parents began interfering with Dorothy’s programme of work. That—trouble with the parents—is part of the regular routine of life in a private school. All parents are tiresome from a teacher’s point of view, and the parents of children at fourth-rate private schools are utterly impossible. On the one hand, they have only the dimmest idea of what is meant by education; on the other hand, they look on “schooling” exactly as they look on a butcher’s bill or a grocer’s bill, and are perpetually suspicious that they are being cheated. They bombard the teacher with ill-written notes making impossible demands, which they send by hand and which the child reads on the way to school. At the end of the first fortnight Mabel Briggs, one of the most promising girls in the class, brought Dorothy the following note:

“Dear Miss,—Would you please give Mabel a bit more arithmetic? I feel that what your giving her is not practacle enough. All these maps and that. She wants practacle work, not all this fancy stuff. So more arithmetic, please. And remain,

“Yours Faithfully,