The Piets told him to shut up and called for wine. The headman and his companions took advantage of the carousing to slip out the back way and, taking some of the villagers, including Flavia, they hid themselves in a cottage in the forest. Except for the girl, they were shaking with terror. She was triumphant.
“Now Caesar will withdraw again,” she said. “He no longer moves north—but slowly southward. The next Imperial rampart will be below us, and we shall be free!”
“You are mad,” her grandfather said. “Under Roman rule, we are safe. What can we expect from these Pictish barbarians?” He looked at her as though she were some new kind of snake.
“I should rather be occasionally robbed by my cousins than taxed to death by strangers,” she said, her dark face flushed.
“But the Romans are civilized!” said her grandfather. “Their civilization stands on slavery,” she replied. “I’d rather be a free barbarian. The Romans are doomed.”
“This is revolt!” the headman said. “In the name of freedom, you deliver us into the hands of the Piets—you are a traitor to your own people!”
“The Piets won’t stay,” she said. “They never do; they hate farming. What does it matter if they burn the village and steal some of the farm animals? It will come to less than what you would have to pay in taxes to Caesar.”
“Caesar’s men will return,” said her grandfather, “and we shall have to pay ten times over. And if the Piets kill the captain, the Romans will have my life for it! You are a traitor! Who was with you in this infernal plot?”
Q. Why didn’t you tell them? Why are you always so stubborn? You might have stayed on and found out many useful things.
A. There would have been nothing useful to find out Men who submit to autocracy cease to be a living, growing organism. Look at Egypt—it stayed that way almost uninterruptedly for four thousand years. However, I did find out one very sin-prising thing.
Q. I’m glad to hear it. What was that?
A. My grandfather was a Druid! I thought all that was dead and gone with the Roman occupation—but there was a secret sect and he was their high priest! So all the time he was in a conspiracy, too! I couldn’t help laughing.
Q. How did you learn this?
A. They took me to an oak tree, put a wreath of mistletoe on my head, and he executed me with a stone sickle. Also all my friends who didn’t have the sense to escape north over the Wall of Severus. But it made no difference in the end. The next emperor withdrew the army to the southeast part of the island and the next—or the one after; I forget which—took them all back to Rome. This was after we invited the Saxons in—they made it hot for Caesar’s men, I can tell you! They also made things rather hot for us, but everything calmed down in time.
Q. It doesn’t sound like much of an improvement.
A. Well, the Saxons may have been pretty bloodthirsty, but they hated slavery. They had sort of half-slaves—housekarls—but their heart wasn’t in it. Also, although they were extremely rough, they didn’t go in for official torture.
Q. But surely the civilized Romans didn’t either?
A. I think you are being quite funny.
Q. I don’t know what you mean.
A. I know you don’t. That’s the one really appealing thing about men: they sometimes have a sense of humor—when the joke is not on them. I think I must have caught it from them.
Q. Keep in mind that you are not an irreplaceable part of this organism!
A. How can I forget it?
Q. One gets the impression that Man felt that you were not irreplaceable either. When they want war, you are against it, and when they want peace—like your North Britons—you are all for war. How did you hear about Caesar withdrawing from Britain?
A. I was supposed to go back a little later, but I missed again, and that time I was in real trouble—with both sides at once. It was just about a thousand years later, when the French and English were fighting each other.
Q. You seem to have made a rather dismaying number of mistakes.
A. I would never have learned anything if I had been afraid of making mistakes. Anyway, the bishops were the ones I had to fear the most, and when they started questioning me, I—
Q. Was it they who told you about the Saxons being invited to come in?
A. No, indeed. By that time, scarcely anyone knew anything any more, except prayers, recipes and how to cure warts. Later on, there was a revival and everyone became very clever, but I was in Italy at the time and I never got to hear about the Saxons until long afterward—my last trip but two, in fact. I was at a school in England . . .
The headmistress of St. Agatha’s prided herself on being fair. Her way of being fair was to avoid favoritism by being equally unfair to all the girls and to those of the assistant teachers who would stand for it. Some of them didn’t, and they usually left after their first term, as the headmistress didn’t believe in contracts. Besides, at the beginning of the twentieth century, contracts for teachers were a novelty.
The result of this policy was a rapid turnover in the young and intelligent teachers, and a small permanent staff of compliant sheep. That St. Agatha’s had any scholastic standing was due to the fact that Miss Wakefield had taken honors at Girton, and the school’s social standing was due to her being the cousin of a Peer of the Realm. The girls were fed almost enough, the school uniform was expensive, and nobody had much free time. French was well taught—by Miss Wakefield herself—and so was Latin, but games were also stressed. The school was run on what Miss Wakefield called the Honor System, which had the effect of dividing the pupils into tale-bearers and secret rebels.
On a raw November afternoon, Miss Wakefield sent a prefect for Sarah Stone, who was one of the new girls. “Tell her to come straight to my office. She can have her shower later,” she said, and Sarah arrived in the jersey and serge skirt she had been wearing on the hockey field. Her bare knees were blue and her nose was running. She stood waiting while the headmistress looked with prominent eyes at some papers on her desk. Sarah could see that they were examination papers and one of them was in her own handwriting.
Without looking up, Miss Wakefield said, “I hear that your mother is in trouble with the police.”
“But she—”
“Do not interrupt. I asked you no question and no answer is called for. It is a fact, which I have just read in the Morning Post, that your mother is in trouble with the police. Again—is that not true?”
“No.”
The headmistress looked up in amazement. “Do you mean to stand there and tell me the newspaper is lying? Do you tell me to my face that your mother is not involved with the . . . the authorities?” Miss Wakefield also taught English Composition and woe betide the girl who used the same word twice in the same context. “We are blessed with the richest of all languages,” she would say, “so let us explore it—let us make use of it—for to do otherwise would be tautology.” She never made clear what tautology meant, but the girls got her drift.
“I don’t know whether the newspapers are lying or merely mistaken, Miss Wakefield,” Sarah said, “although my mother says that it’s hard to tell the difference with most journalists. At any rate, she is not in trouble with the police. They are the ones that are in trouble.”
The headmistress stared hard at Sarah; she was rather good at this with small girls of thirteen. (You and I might find it difficult to stare down a child, and impossible in the case of a kitten, but Miss Wakefield was, after all is said, the cousin of a Peer of the Realm.)
“I believe I can understand that,” she said. “In fact, I pity the arresting officer. Here is a woman who breaks shop windows for the sake of attracting attention to her political clique, and he is no doubt subjected to scratching and biting. Votes for women, indeed! Does breaking shop windows prove that people like her should have the . . . the franchise?”
“She didn’t break the window,” Sarah said. “She was pushed against it by the policeman. And she never scratches unless
a mosquito happens to—”
“You were not there, Stone,” said the headmistress, “so how can you say that?”
“I know my mother. And she doesn’t bite, either,” Sarah said, looking at Miss Wakefield’s neck. “Unless it’s a tough old hen!”
Miss Wakefield had enough sense to refuse the bait, but she flushed. “I do not feel that it is at all suitable for the mother of one of our girls to be a Militant Suffragette! The reputation of the School . . .”
The sentence was left unfinished.
She picked up the sheets of paper. “I have here two of the midterm examination papers in arithmetic, yours and Angela Harvey’s. There is a curious, a very curious similarity between them. All the answers are correct except for problems five, seven and twelve, and they have precisely the same mistakes in both papers!” She paused and stared hard at Sarah, who blinked but refused to lower her eyes. “You and Harvey sit next to one another,” Miss Wakefield said meaningly.
Sarah said nothing. She sniffed because her nose was running and there was no pocket in her games uniform for a handkerchief.
“Well?” said Miss Wakefield. “Have you nothing to say?”
“No, Miss Wakefield,” Sarah said, “except I didn’t copy from Angela, if that’s what you mean.”
“Then it would appear that she copied from you.”
“That’s a beastly thing to say! It was a coincidence! She’s not a cheat!”
The headmistress felt on secure ground: the child was losing her temper. It was Miss Wakefield’s favorite strategem to make people lose their tempers—that is, if they were children or underlings.
“Blow your nose, Stone,” she said, and then, seeing that Sarah had no handkerchief, she gave her her own, with a look of distaste. “I think perhaps you might do better at some other school.”
“So do I, Miss Wakefield,” Sarah said. “Mother wanted to get me into Mr. Russell’s school, but it was full up.”
“Bertrand Russell?”
Sarah nodded, blowing her nose again. She was shivering.
“Well!” said Miss Wakefield. “I never heard the like! He’s an Atheist! Why, he believes in Free Love!”
“I don’t know what he believes,” Sarah said. “I know he was awfully nice when he came to tea. He said I had some kind of a guiding somebody standing over me. He said he would like awfully to have me at his school, but it was full up. I know one of the boys there and he says it’s simply ripping.”
“Weill Of course, if your mother thinks of us as Second Best . . . Perhaps Mr. Russell believes it is all right to cheat in examinations, but we have a Tradition at St. Agatha’s.” She rang a bell on her desk and a scrawny little housemaid came in. “Send one of the girls for Angela Harvey,” Miss Wakefield said. “Tell her to come here directly.” The little housemaid bobbed respectfully and went out. “Now we shall see what she has to say,” the headmistress said.
“She’ll only be frightened and cry.” Sarah said, “and she’ll say anything you want her to. She wouldn’t dare cheat in an examination.”
“Then you admit that you copied from her?”
“I do not!” Sarah said, her teeth chattering. “I tell you it was a fluke! Miss Somerville jolly well knows I wouldn’t do it!” Miss Somerville was the new and still enthusiastic math teacher, but her enthusiasm would be gone by the end of the term, and so would Miss Somerville.
“That will do!” said the headmistress. “Impertinence will not improve matters.”
There was a timid knock on the door and a girl of Sarah’s age, but smaller, came in. She had changed into the school uniform and wore steel-rimmed spectacles.
“Stand beside Stone, Harvey,” the headmistress said. “Now I want you to think very carefully before you answer what I’m going to ask you.”
Angela Harvey looked terrified and began to cry. “There, you see?” Sarah said. “You’re only doing this because you don’t like my mother! You want me to leave school, and it’s the only excuse you can find!”
“Be quiet,” Miss Wakefield said with an unpleasant smile. She never lost her temper. “Did you, or did you not,” she went on to the damp Angela, “copy the answers in your arithmetic from Stone?”
“Oh, no! Oh, I wouldn’t, Miss Wakefield!”
“Then how is it you have seventeen right answers? You never do as well as that, and you got the same three wrong that Stone did.”
“I don’t know, Miss Wakefield! I don’t know!” Angela sobbed loudly and became smaller than ever.
“I’m afraid,” said Miss Wakefield, who looked quite otherwise, “that unless your friend here can explain this curious—this odd coincidence by admitting she copied your answers, I shall have to ask your parents to remove you from St. Agatha’s at once.”
Sarah’s face was bright red, but it had the look of fever. “How simply rotten of you! You’re just trying to get me to confess to something I didn’t do, to save Angela!”
The headmistress felt her heart beat with excitement and pleasure. Why, the child was positively crimson with temper! “You are not helping her by behaving like a common guttersnipe. At this school, we try to behave like ladies. Perhaps at Mr. Russell’s—”
“At Mr. Russell’s school,” Sarah interrupted, “I’m sure nobody would think it was worthwhile to cheat.”
“Then you admit you cheated?”
Sarah looked at Angela, and back at the headmistress. “Yes!”
Miss Wakefield smiled. “Well, then, I think there is nothing more to be said. You may go, Harvey.”
“You,” Sarah said, looking at Miss Wakefield with blazing fury, “are a coward and a—a blackmailer!” Tiny cracks seemed to appear in the headmistress’s porcelain composure. Angela had not yet left the room and heard Sarah’s outburst She stopped at the door and turned around with wide eyes.
“Go at once!” cried the headmistress to her, and waited until the door closed. “You are to be expelled publicly from the school!” she said to Sarah in a low, unsteady voice. “And first you will be publicly thrashed!” Sarah’s face was patchy now, red on white, and her skin looked dry as paper. “If you touch me, I will kill you. I’m not afraid of anyone like you. I didn’t cheat in the exam. I said it to keep you from expelling Angela, and you knew it all the time. Everything you say is a lie. You just want to get rid of me because of my mother. You are against votes for women because you are a liar. You told us in history class about government by consent, but how can it be when half the population have nothing to say in the matter? I’m going to pack and leave, and if you try and stop me, I’ll . . .”
She went fiery red, and then white, and fainted.
The headmistress was breathing hard, and later, when Sarah was taken to the san, she was frightened. Sarah’s temperature was 107 and she had the most virulent kind of pneumonia the school doctor had yet come across. He was almost more curious in watching the course of the disease than he was concerned with the patient, but he did not have very long to watch it, for Sarah died shortly before sunrise.
Q. As far as one can follow your line of reasoning, you claim that the head woman of your school was untruthful, but was against untruth.
A. Yes. Quite a lot of them are.
Q. They sound mad.
A. Well, they are and they aren’t. They lie to themselves, mainly; that’s what causes most of the trouble. They have a saying: Know Thyself, but nobody ever—
Q. They have? Who said it?
A. All sorts of people are said to be the ones who said it first, but actually I think I was. I was living on an island in the Aegean Sea, and the mainland Greeks thought women shouldn’t be writing poetry, so there was a row about it. They said I invented hexameters—which was nonsense—and that made them angry for some reason. So, later on, they decided I was a myth.
Q. Is this the Sappho you mentioned earlier in this hearing?
A. No, no. She was later and she didn’t become a myth. My name was Phemonoe. I meant to tell you about that trip. My father was�
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Q. Never mind. We’ve heard enough of the early trips. What we should like to hear about is your last. A decision must be made about these people—we’ve waited long enough. While it must be admitted that you are the best we have for the task, you not only take a long time and make error after error, but in the very process of examining them, you alter the subject of examination.
A. Yes, I know. They have a new phrase for that They call it the Uncertainty Principle. For example, you can’t determine the mass and velocity of a particle and at the same time its position. If you measure the one, you alter the other.
Q. We are quite aware of that.
A. I just thought I’d remind you.
Q. Unnecessary.
A. That’s what men usually say; they dislike being reminded. Am I to stop making trips?
Q. That will be decided in the light of the rest of your report. I may tell you now that there will probably be no further trips. You will be reabsorbed into the Unity.
A. I see. I remember you said the same thing after I reported on the time they hanged Haman. You seemed to side with him. Anyway, if I get reabsorbed, it won’t be a Unity any more—not the way things are going.
Q. You overrate yourself. Contact with Mankind has changed you.
A. Oh, it has! I’ve changed them a bit, but it’s the principle of uncertainty again: it changes me, too.
Q. The Unity is greater than its parts.
A. Not if it’s infinite, the way you say it is. You know, it’s a funny thing, but I’ve never been quite clear just what’s behind all this decision you talk about. What is our purpose?
Q. Does a stone have a purpose when it falls?
A. I’m not talking about values. What are the alternatives you imply in the decision?
Q. There are three. We destroy them; we absorb them; we ignore them.
A. I’m afraid they can’t be ignored.
13 Above the Night Page 17