Miss Tracey gave the signal to rise, and there was a scraping back of chairs and a clattering of feet. Everyone poured out of the dim room, with its glimpse of the stems of laurels at the top of the basement windows, stems that stayed still and quiet, instead of perpetually passing on, as feet seen from a basement that gives upon the street pass on and are gone. The laurels, black and snaky as the laurels in the back garden, would always be there. Julia sped up to the first-floor bathroom. There hung Miss Tracey’s cap and gown upon the door. Miss Tracey herself had gone into the mistresses’ room for coffee. Julia threw on the gown, poised the cap at a jaunty angle over her wing of hair, and looked in the glass. Colour had sprung to life on her cheek-bones, a colour that matched her scarlet blouse. She couldn’t have been wearing anything that would have looked better with the black cap and gown.
She rushed downstairs. Somehow the news had spread about the school, and every doorway and passage was crammed with eager girls, not a mistress was in sight save Mademoiselle, who smiled sympathetically, though nervously. Julia stayed poised, half-way down the last flight of stairs, laughing and flushed. It was fun, all the girls staring at her, admiring her, even the big girls gaping with awe and admiration, fearful (as Julia herself was) that the door of the mistresses’ room might open and Miss Tracey emerge. Not that Julia had committed a crime, but Miss Tracey was quite capable of saying something cutting that might make Julia look small. … It would be thrilling if Miss Tracey were angry with her in private, but it wouldn’t be a bit funny to be snubbed in public. … So Julia laughed and waved her hand and fled upstairs again, and had just hung the gown upon the door and poised the black cap a-top of it, when Miss Tracey arrived, mildly surprised at the flock of girls in the doorways. She gazed at Julia’s flushed cheeks in surprise.
“You’re not feverish, are you, Julia? Because I was just going to ask you if you would do something for me. Miss Amherst is feeling ill and has gone to lie down, and I wondered if you would take the second form while they’re doing their prep. this afternoon? You won’t have anything to do but keep order.”
“I’d love to,” said Julia, glowing still more, “of course I’ll do it. I’m only sorry I’ll miss grammar with you.” Julia never said “Miss Tracey” except when she was speaking in class; she knew how this bright and gay assumption of equality in friendship pleased the older woman.
“Grammar … oh, Julia, I don’t think you’ll mind missing that much. If only you were as good at grammar as you are at history! I can’t understand why you aren’t. You’re so fond of literature. I should have thought you would have been good at grammar.”
Julia thrilled to the unconscious compliment of that “you,” even as she replied smilingly: “Oh, I’m afraid I care more for what people write than the way they write it, and I love history because it’s stories about people.”
The Little Ones
Julia sat on the bench that was made in one with the high desk before it, with her notebook open before her, and the Mark Book, symbol of authority, spread out beside it. In front of the desk were three rows of “little ones.” They nudged each other, gazed up at her with impish or limpid eyes, pretending to be busy or were openly defiant. Julia felt her heart beating nervously, and remembered Lucy Snowe when she had first been put in charge of an unruly class at the school in Villette. Unfortunately, she felt no such upwelling of power within herself as had visited Lucy for her salvation.
The children “tried it out.” Julia spoke sharply, but calmly, and there was a momentary subsidence of the giggling and whispering. Opposite to Julia sat Gladys Pepper, Dorothy’s younger sister, a lovely child with red ringlets and a laughing face. Julia was helpless before beauty, and especially she loved the way that this child’s mouth opened over her teeth when she smiled. Her lips were too thin in repose, but when she laughed and showed her little pointed teeth, her open mouth was just the right shape. Julia found herself softening towards Gladys, quite the naughtiest child there, because she wanted to see that hard little mouth suddenly transformed into the lovely “square” open mouth that was so satisfying because it was so right.
Next to Gladys sat one of the little boys (they were taken in the first forms, when it was to be presumed they were yet too innocent to corrupt, after the manner of their sex, the little girls).
Leonard Carr was nine years old, already a year too old in age and several years too old in knowledge, had the truth about him been known, for the second form. He was a fine well-grown boy, about to become a pupil at a seedy academy for the Sons of Professional Men that stood behind the main road down Hammersmith way. Leonard’s father was really a tradesman, being the manager of a small jeweller’s shop in the Strand, but the Academy did not look too closely into such matters. Julia’s father had sold the Carrs the little house in which they lived near Heronscourt Park, and there was a slight degree of friendship between the older Carrs and Almonds. Julia and Leonard were too far apart in years to be interested in it. Leonard had bright bold brown eyes, and a full mouth above an abrupt little jaw. He was a young demon, and Julia eyed him nervously. He was giggling and showing Gladys a box he was holding under the desk.
“What have you got there?” said Julia sharply. Leonard looked at her defiantly with his shallow bright eyes.
“You aren’t the teacher,” he said.
The moment had come, it was necessary to gain ascendancy. “Gladys,” said Julia calmly, “show me what you and Leonard have there.” As she spoke she looked straight at Gladys, screwing up her short-sighted eyes, but letting what she felt to be a human understanding inform them with a kindly twinkle. Gladys capitulated, and Julia felt a little thrill of triumph. The lovely “square” smile flashed out, and Gladys, taking a long white oblong cardboard box from Leonard, advanced to the desk.
“It’s a peepshow, Julia. See, you look in this end.” Leonard jumped up. After all, it was his peepshow, and this girl, though ever so old, was not one of the teachers. He called out:—“You can’t look without paying! You can’t look without paying!”
Julia stopped with the box half-way to her eyes. Something in this vital, grinning little urchin’s face touched her quick imagination. “You’ve got to pay a pin!” he insisted, “You’ve got to pay a pin!” Julia remembered how all the “little ones” had been parading about for days with boxes of differing shapes and sizes, chanting—“A pin to see the peepshow … a pin to see the peepshow!” It was one of those fashions that sweep a school, and each child had firmly clutched a box, unyielding of its joys, till a pin had been forthcoming.
She smiled, a charming elder-sister smile, at the little boy.
“But why a pin?” she said. “What good does a pin do to you?” Leonard looked a little taken aback. The fact was that the collecting of pins was a purely arbitrary rite decreed by fashion, and except that Leonard and a few other daring spirits used them for gambling with, at twelve a penny, they were of no use at all. He thought he had better say nothing about the gambling, and, coming out from his place to stand beside her, he merely answered: “Oh, we collect pins, you know,” and laid a grubby hand on the white cardboard show-box. Julia felt in the front of her blouse, and found a relic of last week’s dressmaking activities in the form of a pin, and presented it indulgently to Leonard. Then she picked up the box. A round hole was cut at each end, one covered with red transparent paper, one empty. To the empty hole was applied an eye, shutting the other in obedience to eager instructions.
And at once, sixteen-year-old, worldly-wise London Julia ceased to be, and a child—an enchanted child—was looking into fairyland.
The floor of the box was covered with cotton-wool, and a frosting of sugar sprinkled over it. Light came into the box from the red-covered window at the far end, so that a rosy glow as of sunset lay over the sparkling snow. Here and there little brightly-coloured men and women, children and animals of cardboard, conversed or walked about. A cottage, flanked by a couple
of fir trees, cut from an advertisement of some pine-derivative cough cure, which Julia saw every day in the newspaper, gave an extraordinary impression of reality and of distance. This little rose-tinted snow scene was at once amazingly real and utterly unearthly. Everything was just the wrong size—a child was larger than a grown man, a duck was larger than a horse; a bird, hanging from the sky on a thread, loomed like a cloud. It was a mad world, compact of insane proportions, but lit by a strange glamour. The walls and lid of the box gave to it the sense of distance that a frame gives to a picture, sending it backwards into another space. Julia stared into the peepshow, and it was as though she gazed into the depths of a complete and self-contained world, where she would go clad in snow-shoes and furs, and be able to tame savage huskies and shoot bears; a world of chill pallor, of an illimitable white sky, both only saved from a cruel rigour by the rosy all-pervading light.
It might have been possible for someone less eager and much older than Julia to apply an eye to that box and see nothing but cardboard advertisements and cotton-wool, but it was not possible for her. For the moment that she gazed into that space of some ten inches by five, she was lost in a fourth dimension of which she had never heard. The illusion only lasted for a second, but time is not to be measured by the clock, any more than space is to be measured by inches. She felt a delicious pleasure, was lapped about by it, then withdrew her eye, and was in the schoolroom world again.
“Very pretty,” she said primly, “but this is prep. time, and you must get on with your lessons. I’ll keep the box on my desk. Go back to your place, Leonard.”
He gazed at her under scowling brows, and clenched his grubby fists. Then he took the box, and crouching down, placed the peepshow between the legs of his own desk. Julia, staring down at this act of insubordination, saw the top of his rough dark head, and saw his bare knees, very square and solid, the skin so tightly stretched across them that the white light from the tall windows lay across the modelling of them like water. She was for the first time in her life struck by the fact that, apart from the obvious indication over which children might snigger, a little boy was always unmistakably a little boy. Those chunky knees could not have belonged to a little girl. The actual distinct quality of masculinity, insistent from the cradle to the grave, struck at her mind. She didn’t think Leonard an attractive little boy, he was cheeky and dirty, but she was impressed nevertheless, though her sex-vanity resented the fact. She sharply ordered him back to his seat, and, having sufficiently shown his independence, he obeyed.
Julia went on with her own work, and the class subsided into quietness. Presently a squabble arose between Gladys and the little girl on the other side of her from Leonard. Julia called them to order, and Gladys looked up with her flashing smile. The other child, an unpleasant red-faced little creature with a Cockney voice, continued to mutter to herself. Julia spoke to her, and she tossed her thin, greasy locks and said something under her breath that Julia rightly guessed must be impertinent. Julia drew the Mark Book towards her and lifted her pencil.
“Minnie Tooth, take an Order Mark,” she said importantly, and scored the damaging little black line, writing “Minnie Tooth” opposite to it in the approved manner.
The thing was a success … the class was impressed. Only Julia knew that she hadn’t really gone into the ethics of the case. The lovely Gladys might have been wrong in the initial squabble for all she knew … Julia salved her conscience with the thought that she had given the Order Mark because of Minnie’s impertinence to herself, who stood in the place of a teacher. And, technically speaking, she was correct. Quiet brooded over the class till the bell sounded, when a mistress arrived, and Julia gathered up her belongings and went back to her own classroom.
Arithmetic
There it was, just the same as ever, long and low, with its big window giving upon the back garden, where the afternoon sunlight lit the neglected turf to brightness. There was Miss Tracey sitting at her desk, her lint-pale hair pushed off her brow, her pince-nez glimmering, the now-famous gown slipping half-off her shoulders; there was Dorothy Pepper, her puffed red hair and secretive face looking more fox-like than ever; there was the sentimental puppyish Dora, and earnest Mary Barnes; all the other pupils who composed the Upper Fifth and the Sixth, sitting in rows. And suddenly Julia became muddled between this world that she knew so well and which she knew was the real world, and the peepshow she had just been living in for a fraction of time. She had been aware of the peepshow world again just before she turned the handle of her classroom door, and the warm light of the classroom gave an impression of unreality to the familiar scene. The moment of confusion had gone as quickly as it had come, but it had given a queer little uncertainty to Julia, who was always so sure about life.
She had forgotten it a moment later, when she opened her book for the arithmetic lesson. Yet enough of the uncertainty remained with her to make the arithmetic less of a precise and easy joy than usual, and as the lesson went on, Julia’s attention wandered. Her exciting day began to seem flat and dull. It had been gorgeous putting on Miss Tracey’s cap and gown, with all the school giggling at her, but now she began to wish that she had let Miss Tracey catch her at the impertinence. What was the use of the dashing gesture if Miss Tracey didn’t know of it? Julia had attracted no more notice from the only person who mattered than if she had never done the deed.
Julia began to make swift sketches in her arithmetic book. She had a certain facility with her pencil, though she had neither enough talent nor training for economy of line, but she could “catch a likeness.” She drew Mary Barnes, with her terrier face, pursuing Dorothy Pepper with her fox face, towards a goal marked “Top of the School.” and the girls on either side of her began to giggle. Julia added balloons coming out of her victims’ mouths, with unwitty but extremely characteristic remarks inscribed therein. The girls giggled more loudly. Miss Tracey looked down the room, frowned, raised her fair brows and said: “Quiet there, please.” Julia added Dora Hart, with a plumy tail, gambolling far behind, and began to comment on her drawings in a running undertone. Miss Tracey lost patience and said clearly: “Julia Almond, take an Order Mark.”
It was the first time such a thing had ever happened to Julia, and all over the room heads were turned towards her. She smiled, and went on drawing. The lesson was just at an end, and there came the sound of a gathering of books, of the opening and shutting of desks, and then the scraping of feet, that was, with the bell, the most characteristic sound of life in the school.
Julia always carried Miss Tracey’s books up to the mistresses’ room for her when school was over; this was recognised as an honour, and no one ever disputed it with her. Now Julia sat humming to herself, neither moving towards Miss Tracey’s desk nor going away towards the cloakroom. “She’ll ask me,” thought Julia, her heart thumping, hardly daring to look up, lest she saw the books being confided to another girl, “I’m stronger than she is, she’ll ask me.” And, unacknowledged even to herself, ran the thought that she had wished Miss Tracey to give her that Order Mark, that she had forced her to do it.
“Julia, will you carry my books up for me?” came Miss Tracey’s quiet voice, even quieter than usual. Julia rose, went up the room, took the books and stood aside to let Miss Tracey pass through the door before her. They passed in silence up the stairs, and into the mistresses’ room, which was empty. Julia bore the books over to the side table and put them down, then turned to face poor, bewildered Miss Tracey.
“Julia … what on earth was the matter with you? So rude … so unlike yourself … you’ve never been like that before. …”
“Oh, I felt like it,” said Julia casually. Miss Tracey looked helpless for a moment, then remarked with unexpected dryness: “Well, don’t feel like it again.”
The scene was fizzling out … Julia took charge of it. She flung her head back, and with a flash from eyes that for once opened widely, she said: “Well, you shouldn’t have
done what you did.”
“I? Done what I did?”
“Given me that Order Mark.”
“I couldn’t let you behave as you did without giving you an Order Mark. That was your punishment.”
Julia felt her eyes flash again, her head go up still more. “My punishment? How dare you use that word to me?” They stood confronting each other for a moment, the woman and the girl equally ignorant of what the scene was about, of what force was really driving Julia. Mademoiselle drifted into the room, saw the two tense figures against the window, and with a faint murmur of apology drifted out again like a moth. Julia noted with triumph that Miss Tracey hadn’t even noticed that futile entry.
Oh, if only Julia were a little girl at a Council School and Miss Tracey could take the cane to her, how thrilling that would be … to have to hold out her hand, still with those flashing eyes and that proud head, and feel the swift descent and bite of a cane wielded by Miss Tracey! Why wasn’t she at the Council School she had attended as a little girl, where there had been nobody she loved? This moment couldn’t go any further, it must be changed now, or it would be spoilt. And Julia’s eyes suddenly swam with real tears. She began to gulp piteously.
“I’m sorry. It’s all my fault. But if you knew what I’ve been feeling like all day … at home … before I came. …”
Miss Tracey’s kind little pansy face lost its primness, seemed to melt and run together at the edges. Something had to be said to meet that sympathy worthily.
“My dog … you know … I’ve told you about him … Bobby. She’s killed him.”
“Killed him? My dear, what do you mean?”
“My mother. She’s had him chloroformed. … He’d got mange. I’ve not really been able to think of anything else.”
A Pin to See the Peepshow Page 3