Читать книгу Clark's Field - Robert Herrick - Страница 14

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The civilized inhabitants of our twentieth-century world are acquainted with many more kinds of torture than the ingenious managers of the Inquisition ever dreamed of in their most lurid nightmares. And of all these peculiarly modern forms of torture, perhaps the fashionable girls' school such as Herndon Hall takes first rank. A boys' school of the same order—conducted under the patronage of some holy saint's name—is often pretty bad, but it cannot rival the girls' school because women are more skillful in applying social torture and have a thousand ways of doing it to a man's or boy's one. Even among the softest and snobbiest of boys and masters there will always remain a residuum of male self-respect. If the newcomer, no matter how wrongly classed, proves that he has physical courage, or an aptitude for sports, or even a sunny, common-sense disposition, he will quickly escape from his probationary period of torture and become tolerated; while if a girl appears among her future schoolmates with an ill-made, unfashionable frock, or has manners that betray less sophistication than is to be expected, she may never survive the torture that begins on the instant and follows her relentlessly, in the schoolroom and out, until she either adapts herself to her environment, becoming in turn a torturer, or is removed to a more congenial environment.

Adelle Clark presented to the little world of Herndon Hall a very vulnerable appearance when she arrived at the school on that Friday evening. She was still wearing the blue serge school dress that she and her aunt had made for her high-school début, also some coarse, faded brown stockings, and stout cheap shoes, not to mention an unmentionable hat of no style at all. She had taken that unfortunate joke of the trust company's president literally: she must not waste her substance upon clothes. Even without this inhibition she had scarcely the skill and the courage necessary to spend her two hundred dollars to advantage in three days. So she had bought herself a trunk, a few suits of much-needed heavy underwear, some handkerchiefs, and a coat that she had desired all winter, a thick, clumsy affair that completely enveloped her slight figure. Then her imagination of wants had given out.

The young teacher, who had taken Miss Thompson's place because of a sudden indisposition that attacked the head mistress, had made Adelle uncomfortably aware that something was wrong, but she put down her coolness and unsympathetic silence during their brief journey to the fact that Miss Stevens was a "teacher" and therefore felt "superior," "Rosy," as the older Hall girls called Miss Stevens, was not at all "superior" in her attitude to the girls. She dressed quite smartly and youthfully and was their best confidante. But she had received a shock when she saw "that little fright" (as she reported to Miss Thompson) timidly sitting on the edge of her chair in the parlor of the Eclair Hotel. "Where can she come from?" she had said to herself; and later she had supplemented this query by thinking, "wherever it was, she had better go back to it as fast as she can—the little fright!"

Fortunately Adelle did not understand the glances that the elegant young women who were chattering in the Hall drawing-room before dinner cast upon her when she was introduced to her schoolmates. Nor did she immediately comprehend the intention of the insults and tortures to which she was submitted during the ensuing year. She felt lonely: she missed her aunt and even the "roomers" more than she had expected to. But gradually even into her dumb mind there penetrated a sense of undeserved ignominy, not clearly localized, because she did not possess a sufficient knowledge of sophisticated manners to realize the refined nature of her torture. She had merely an accumulating sense of pain and outrage. She was not happy in Herndon Hall: she did not know it until afterwards, but that was the plain truth. Nobody wanted her there, and she knew enough to understand it. Even a cat or a dog has sufficient social sense for that!

Externally Herndon Hall was all that was charming and gracious—a much more beautiful and refined home than Adelle had ever seen. It occupied one of those spacious old manorial houses above the Hudson, where the river swept in a gracious curve at the foot of the long lawn. An avenue of old trees led up to the large stone house from the high road half a mile away. There were all sorts of dependencies—stables, greenhouses, and ornamental gardens of the old-fashioned kind—which were carefully kept up so that the Hall resembled a large private estate, such as it was meant to be, rather than a school. It was popularly supposed that Herndon Hall had once been the country-place of Miss Thompson's people, which was not true; but that shrewd woman of the world, recognizing all the advantages of an aristocratic background, kept up the place on a generous footing, with gardeners, stablemen, and many inside servants, for which, of course, the pupils paid liberally. The Hall was run less as a school than as a private estate. Many of the girls had their own horses in the stable, and rode every pleasant afternoon under the care of an old English riding-master, who was supposed to have been "Somebody in England" once. (Later on, when the motor became popular the girls had their own machines, but that was after Adelle's time.) There was lawn tennis on the ample lawns, and this with the horseback riding and occasional strolls was the only concession to the athletic spirit of the day.

The schoolrooms were not the feature of the Hall that one might expect. They were confined to a small wing in the rear, or the basement, and there were no laboratories or other paraphernalia of modern education. The long drawing-room, with its recessed windows facing the river, was hung with "old masters"—a few faded American protraits and some recent copies of the Italian school. It was also furnished luxuriously and had books in handsome bindings. But educationally, in any accepted sense of the word, Herndon Hall was quite negligible, as all such institutions for the care of the daughters of the rich must be, as long as the chief concern of its patrons is to see their daughters properly married and "taking a good position in society." Adelle quickly perceived that, though she had been reckoned a dull pupil in the Alton Girls' High School, she had much more than enough book knowledge to hold her own in the classes of her new school. If it is difficult to say what is a good education for a boy whose parents can afford to give him "the best," it is almost impossible to solve the educational riddle for his sister. She must have good manners, an attractive person, and, less clearly, some acquaintance with literature, music, and art, and one modern language to enable her to hold her own in the social circles that it is presumed she will adorn. At least that was the way Miss Thompson looked at the profound problem of girls' education. She herself was accounted "accomplished," a "brilliant conversationalist," and "broadly cultured," with the confident air that the best society is supposed to give, and her business was to impart some of this polish to her pupils. "Conversation," it may be added, was one of the features of Herndon Hall.

Art, music, and literature did not seem to awaken Adelle's dormant mind any more than had the rigorous course of the public schools. She did as most of the girls did—nothing—coming unprepared day after day to her recitations to be helped through the lessons by the obliging teachers, who professed to care little for "mere scholarship" and strove rather to "awaken the intelligence" and "stir the spirit," "educate the taste," and all the rest of the fluff with which an easy age excuses its laziness. The girls at Herndon Hall impudently bluffed their teachers or impertinently replied that they "didn't remember," just like their papas and future husbands when they were cornered on the witness stand by inconvenient questions about shady transactions.

The tone of the school was distinctly fashionable, also idle and luxurious, which was what its patrons desired. Many of the mothers and other female relatives of the girls, besides the "old girls" themselves, ran up to the school from New York, which was not far away, bringing with them a rich atmosphere of jewels, clothes, and gossip that seemed to hang about the large drawing-room of the stately stone mansion. The more fortunate pupils found frequent excuses for getting down to the gay city for the theater and parties, and there were besides boys from a neighboring college, with parties to the races, all discreetly chaperoned, of course.

Miss Thompson was at great pains to maintain what the "old Hall girls" called the "tone of Herndon," so that careful mothers and fathers should have no hesitation in confiding to it their daughters from fear that they might encounter "undesirable associates." In all the years of its existence Miss Thompson had never admitted a member of a certain religious creed. Yet latterly there had been rumors that the Hall was not what it once had been. There were too many "Western" girls: some said Herndon was getting "Pittsburghy." There were certain lively daughters of Western millionaires, two in especial from the great State of California whom Adelle later on was thrown with, who did not add to the exclusive atmosphere of the Hall.

The path of the manager of a fashionable school is by no means an easy one. It is, in fact, as Miss Thompson had found, more difficult than the famous eye of the needle. For if she were so scrupulous as to bar out all the daughters of new wealth, she was in danger of lacking that material support without which Herndon Hall could not be maintained. And if she admitted too freely rich "Western girls" whose parents were "nobodies," but were keenly anxious to have their daughters become "somebodies," she was in danger of watering her wine to the point where it would lose all its potency. A constant equilibrium between the good-family class and the merely rich must be maintained if the school was to preserve its position. And so it can be understood why the proprietor and the teachers of Herndon Hall carefully scrutinized Adelle on her first appearance. Would she merely water their precious wine? If so she must be very rich, indeed, to compensate for her diluting presence. Miss Thompson had accepted her on the strength of President West's personal letter, and it did not take her long to discover that she had made a grave mistake. Adelle was all water!