Clang … clang … clang … the school bell crashed in upon her absorption and went on sounding through the classrooms and corridors. Miss Tracey … whose presence had power to turn Julia’s even pulses into a riot, came beating back into her consciousness on the beats of the bell.
Julia gave a final touch to the gold-brown wing, and, a little late, but unhurried, went towards the classroom. And with her, as part of her, though she was at the moment thinking of nothing but that she would see Miss Tracey, went the small sum of her knowledge of this life. A sense of being clean to the point of freshness, a sense not common enough to her class to be taken as a matter of course (Julia had to bear with the sneers of her family on her habit, caught from Miss Tracey, of a swift morning bath), a sense of her own high-held head, of the fine clear spring morning, of the existence all about her of Chiswick, of the outspread greenness of Heronscourt Park where home was, and where she walked on Sundays with Bobby, the white and chestnut mongrel; of the hundreds of clerks and girls who went to work, and who poured out of the trains and down the wooden stairs to the street like a dark spilled liquid every evening; of the underclothes that lay against her body; serge knickers with batiste lining, and a cambric chemise and a moirette petticoat and black cashmere stockings; of Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth, whom they were “doing” that term; of that tiresome and perpetually moving Saint Paul whom they were also “doing”; of the fact that any day something wonderful might happen that would change the whole of life—someone might leave her a fortune, having admired her silently from afar; or a lord might fall in love with her … all this knowledge, of extraordinary little help to her or anyone, brimmed the back of her mind.
She went into the long classroom, the last girl to enter, with her usual calm arrogance, tempered by a smiling politeness, as of one equal to another, towards Miss Tracey, standing in cap and gown by the desk.
Miss Tracey began to read out the short prayers. When they were over, Julia sank back on her bench and opened her desk. There was a scraping of feet and a settling of bodies all about her. The school, with its familiar smells—a mingling of exercise books, clothes, varnished wood, girls, cabbage, roasting meat, and dust—took her by the nostrils and was as savoury as incense.
Recess, and a stroll of twenty minutes up and down the lawn, past the clumps of sickly laurels, whose leaves were blotched with a leprous white. Beneath these leaves the black roots and branches curved like snakes in ambush. Julia hated the garden because of the laurels. While the other girls walked about in couples, heads together, Julia stayed behind in the classroom, pretending to make notes in her notebook. Miss Tracey, her lint-fair head, where the threads of silver hardly showed, sat bent over the marks she was adding up, her pince-nez drooping from her straight little nose. Julia couldn’t help wishing that Miss Tracey didn’t wear pince-nez, though of course it didn’t really make her any less lovable. Only there was always something rather silly about “specs” and she couldn’t bear that there should be anything silly about Miss Tracey. Julia herself would never wear “specs,” however short-sighted she became. She would only, when she had got on in the world so that it didn’t look unsuitable, have one of those hold-up things on a long stem, and gaze at people haughtily.
She would, of course, get on in the world, she never doubted that. She knew, because of the way she was treated here at school, that she was somebody, although she wasn’t the prettiest or even the cleverest girl in the school. Julia wasn’t going in for “Matric” because she hadn’t, till she came to the High School last term, had a good enough education, and because she was soon leaving to go to the Polytechnic for “art.” Julia’s father was only a clerk in a House and Estate Agency, and though it was better than being Mary Barnes, whose father was a small draper in the Chiswick High Road, it wasn’t as good as being Edith Darling, whose father was Something-in-the-City, or Anne Ackroyd, who was a doctor’s daughter.
Fathers … they were important if it came to crossing swords at school, but they didn’t really matter, not if one was enough of a somebody. And Julia was the most dominant girl in the school; somehow—by no means that she could have puzzled out even to herself, except that she was vaguely aware it was just by being herself, and unafraid—she had taken that position. That was how she had established a footing of equality with Miss Tracey. Julia knew that in a way even Miss Tracey looked up to her … which, after all, was only natural, for Julia was young, and Miss Tracey was thirty-five-if-a-day. Julia had a sort of dashing assurance, her very adoration for Miss Tracey partook of the gallant swagger of a young man. Sometimes they met in the first-floor bathroom just before lunch, where Miss Tracey was washing her pretty, very white hands, and had put her rings safely on the edge of the basin. Julia, laughing, swaggering, would pick the rings up, and slip them on Miss Tracey’s fingers, and drop a kiss on the hand at the finish, feeling like one of the cavaliers out of a Stanley Weyman novel as she did so. Other girls who had a rave on Miss Tracey, would timidly place flowers on her desk. Julia never did that. Once, indeed, she had even taken a bunch of flowers away from a younger girl who had brought them for Miss Tracey, and coolly appropriated them for her own desk. The girl had been keen on Julia, too, and she merely giggled a feeble protest.
Certainly it was thrilling being at school, and in a way Julia could have wished it to go on for ever. As she gazed now at Miss Tracey adding up marks, it seemed to her that nothing more lovely than this friendship could ever happen. Miss Tracey, as though aware of that ardent gaze, lifted her blue eyes, small pretty triangular eyes that even pince-nez couldn’t spoil. “Well, Julia, what sonnet have you chosen for to-day’s Shakespeare?” asked Miss Tracey pleasantly. Julia blushed. She blushed very easily, and hated herself for it.
“Ah, you’ll see,” she answered gaily, “it’s one I loved directly I read it.” Miss Tracey gave her distracted little smile, and her blue eyes wandered to the window. “I always think Dorothy Pepper looks so like a Rossetti,” she observed. Julia also turned her eyes towards the garden. There was that dull girl, Dorothy, walking along, her cloud of frizzy red hair bunched out by combs round her pale foxy face.
Bliss to be spoken to in such a way by Miss Tracey, for of course no other girl in the school would have known what a Rossetti was, and Miss Tracey recognised that fact, but tiresome to hear Dorothy Pepper admired. “Father’s been making enquiries about the Polytechnic,” Julia countered, “he wants me to join next term.” “Oh dear, I shall miss you,” said Miss Tracey frankly, and Julia’s heart sang.
The bell rang again and the girls came pouring in, and settled themselves for the Shakespeare class. Each of the elder girls who cared to do so had learned a sonnet by heart. Not many had so chosen, but of course Mary Barnes had learned “Full many a beauteous morning have I seen,” and Dorothy Pepper gabbled through “Let me not to the marriage of true minds.” It came to Julia’s turn. She looked straight at Miss Tracey and felt she made every word a message as she recited the less popular:
“Being your slave, what should I do but tend,
Upon the time and hour of your desire.
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do save you require …”
Shakespeare really bored Julia, his turns of phrase were so difficult and his stories hard to follow. She preferred Lorna Doone to anything of Shakespeare’s, and at the moment was reading it in snatches under the half-opened lid of her desk, feeling very like one of the wilful warm-hearted girls one read about in school stories, or like Robert in The Martian, reading Monte Cristo behind his desk.
Another bell and Julia gathered up her French dictionary and paper-bound copy of Jocelyn and, always with the hard-working Mary Barnes, whose nose had grown rather shiny by now with the earnestness of her scholastic efforts, went up to a tiny room facing north, cold even upon such a fine day, and settled down to a special French lesson. Mademoiselle was elderly and always blue with co
ld, she wore knitted black woollen mittens and her fingers, shiny with chilblains, poked out from them like sausages. Her face always wore an anxious expression, as well it might, with the supply of younger teachers always coming on, and the demand for such as she consequently going down. In the back of her mind was always present the thought of her mother, who kept a little hardware shop in a village near Boulogne, and whose rheumatism grew worse each year. Julia did not know of the mother and the rheumatism, but her lively young imagination had seized upon the knowledge which her nerves imparted to her—that the Frenchwoman was unhappy and poor and worried, and it gave Julia pleasure to be especially polite to her, to be different from the other girls, who despised Mademoiselle for all these things, and in addition despised her for being French. Julia despised them for insularity, which she thought a splendid word. And Julia liked her “extra” French lessons, because not only did the sort of woman she wanted to be know French, but also she thought Jocelyn a most beautiful and touching poem. That moment when Laurence, whom Jocelyn had thought a boy, was found to be really a beautiful young woman, when after the accident Jocelyn tore open Laurence’s clothes: “Je déchire des dents l’habit lent à s’ouvrir. … Un sein de femme, ô ciel! sous la sanglante toile!” What a thrilling moment, and what a daring thing to write. … Why, you simply saw it as you read. …
Midday
Another bell. Tidy for lunch. Julia, with her usual audacity, instead of going to the wash-place for the day girls, waited and managed to catch just the right moment—the moment when Miss Tracey was washing her hands before lunch. The little ritual of the rings took place, but suddenly the luncheon-bell went, and Miss Tracey took the last ring from her impatiently, saying—“Don’t make me late.” Julia stiffened and decided that Miss Tracey should feel sorry.
Julia waited a moment and then started to go down to the basement dining-room, the room with the blind eyes that showed black from the road, white from within, that her own accustomed eyes had seen that morning. On her way down one of the older girls, who admired Julia immensely, caught her by her scarlet sleeve and whispered: “When are you going to do it?”
Julia suddenly remembered, a few days earlier, she had betted that she would dare to steal Miss Tracey’s cap and gown after lunch, before she herself resumed them, and would appear on the stairs, decked out in those symbols of authority, for the whole school to see. No one had believed that she would do it. Now, with a tingling of the nerves, she answered, “To-day,” and went on down to the dining-room.
The pudding was spotted dog, pale and shiny, with a sprinkling of castor sugar that gave it just the right roughness. Spotted dog was apt to be slimy without gritty sugar. Julia was greedy; she adored good flavours and was already aware of the importance of texture in food. Once, when a little girl at a picnic, she had eaten so much she was sick on getting home. She had been very ashamed, and had succeeded in concealing the dreadful truth. There had been only one occasion when she had failed to hide her fault, and that, unfortunately, had been the previous term at school. Jam-puffs were served and Miss Tracey, a few left before her on the dish, had asked whether anyone would like another. Julia had been the only person to answer that she would, and in a deathly and disapproving silence her plate had travelled down the table and back again. Julia, her face burning, had choked the puff down hurriedly. No one would have been more surprised than she to have been told that her greediness was one of her greatest virtues, that it was part of her zest for life, that zest that gave her imaginative sympathy with Mademoiselle, that made her wonder what went on behind lighted windows at night, that made her flinch at the idea that there could be anything absurd about Miss Tracey. She absorbed everything she could, her avid senses appreciated everything that touched them, from spotted dog to a sunset, and her joy in the sunset could not have been as keen if she had not been able to extract the full flavour out of the spotted dog.
She rolled the last morsel upon her tongue now, and, laying down her fork, looked at the people sitting opposite with her narrow eyes, which short sight made her screw up till they were narrower. Everyone looked just the same as usual. Julia liked that; had anyone changed, the background of her exciting life would have been upset.
Right opposite her was Anne Ackroyd, the cleverest girl in the school, who was going to be a doctor. She was two years older than Julia, and she also was leaving at the end of this term. She was very plain, thought Julia for the hundredth time, but her eyes behind her gold-rimmed spectacles were beautiful, stag’s eyes, deep and gentle, and she had a sweet smile that at moments redeemed the extraordinary length of her chin. Even the bombiness of her shiny forehead was almost saved by its breadth, and by her beautiful straight dark brows, but her skin was sallow, her hair limp and dull, and her whole face too long and cadaverous. Nevertheless, Julia, the beauty-lover, liked and admired Anne. Partly this was because Anne had an intense admiration for Julia, whom she thought wonderfully alive and dashing, but also it was because Julia recognised something out of the ordinary in Anne, in her really good brain, and her self-deprecatory habit of thought. She had none of Julia’s glamour and attack.
Next to her, on the side that was towards the head of the table, was little fair-haired Mignon, “called after the opera.” The efforts of her schoolfellows and mistresses to pronounce the name were disastrous. Mignon would have been pretty save for a certain sloppiness about the modelling of her face, not unlike the sloppiness of Julia’s own. But Mignon’s face would never have the audacity and thrust of Julia’s. Nevertheless, little Mignon—she was one of “the little ones”—was quite a personality in her small way. She had heard once that a theatre “up West” was putting on a play for children, and she had gone “up West” and somehow penetrated to the holy of holies. She had been asked what she could do, and she had danced a few little steps and piped a little song and she had been taken on in the chorus of children, all dressed as snowdrops. Envious schoolfellows who went to see her had said she didn’t dance as well as the others and looked amateurish, but she hadn’t cared. Julia never looked at her without a little pang of envy.
Next to Mignon was sitting Miss Gunther, the music mistress, who sang “Oh! that we two were maying.” She only came twice a week, and it was she who had familiarised Julia with the Indian Love Lyrics and the Humoresque. She had wild dark hair, a rather pretty gipsy face, and wore a black silk frock, cut square at the neck, without a collar. Dora Hart, one of the big girls, who sat next to her, between her and Miss Tracey, had a rave on her. Julia studied Miss Gunther now. Why wasn’t she more exciting? She was certainly prettier than Miss Tracey, whose over-blondness held a bleached and faded quality that her neat little features could not counteract. Also, Miss Gunther was much younger, hardly old at all, only about twenty-two. She wasn’t smart, but then neither was Miss Tracey, though in Julia’s eyes she dressed very charmingly when off duty, in neat little coats and skirts and soft lace blouses and shady hats with feathers in them. It must be that Miss Gunther wasn’t as exciting as Miss Tracey because she wasn’t as real … thought Julia, in her turn worrying her way to a gleam of reality. Miss Gunther thought she would make herself look somebody by getting herself up as a gipsy with all that wild hair, but she wasn’t really enough of a somebody to carry it off. Julia used to tease Dora Hart about her rave on Miss Gunther. … “But you say that two terms ago you had a rave on the music mistress that was here then? Well, then, if you have a rave on Miss Gunther now, if you just took her over when the other one left, it’s like one does with clothes. You have a Sunday dress, and when it gets shabby, you move it down one to second-best, and buy a new Sunday dress. Miss Gunther is your new Sunday dress, and when you’re tired of her, you’ll move her down one to second-best and have a rave on someone newer. You’ll get a new Sunday dress!”
And poor, nice Dora, who could express herself about as well, and in much the same way, as a big Newfoundland dog, waved her large paws and stuttered and tried to say that no
one had ever been quite the same as Miss Gunther, and that she could never, never love anyone else as much, and that when you really suddenly loved someone, you knew that everything that had gone before wasn’t real, and that there wasn’t anything like Sunday dresses about it. And while she tried to explain all this, Julia would stand and laugh at her. For Julia’s instinct told her that if she laughed at other girls who had raves on mistresses, she was concealing her own rave on Miss Tracey. And indeed, she was right. Her laughter and her gallant cavalier swagger, so different from the slavish adoration that was the accepted technique of a rave, did deceive the girls.
Next to Dora, and at the head of the table, sat Miss Tracey. Sweet, intellectual, and completely unaware of the true values of life. Julia knew that, even while her hungry heart had to love her. She knew that Miss Tracey, with all her Latin and Greek, and what-not, didn’t really know anything about life. By life, Julia meant men. She didn’t know much herself, but a saving crudity in her surroundings, a matter-of-course acceptance of facts in her upbringing (if so casual and haphazard a process could be dignified by the word “upbringing”) had taught her a certain amount about the traffic of blind and aching humanity. Next to Miss Tracey came Dorothy Pepper, Mary Barnes, a girl who didn’t count, and then came Julia. Nobody else mattered down the whole long table to the far end where Mademoiselle was in charge, and no one mattered at the two tables for “the little ones.”
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