And there, in the tiny booking-hall, stood a girl—Minerva Strachey—under a light, her hands in her pockets.
“Are you Jill Bradley? Miss Badger asked me to meet you. There’s a taxi outside.”
Jill stared at her, trying in a moment to bridge the gap of six days back to something she hardly remembered.
“Oh,” she said. “I see.”
They slid together into the broad leathery back seat of the taxi, Minerva saying through the open glass partition:
“The school, please.”
“Got to go slow, Miss. Fog’s coming on.”
“Very well.”
The taxi crawled off down the main street of Mallerton, past the Corn Exchange, the driver honking his horn—an old, bugle-shaped one. Jill wondered what Minerva would say to her.
“A good journey?”
“Oh, yes, thank you.”
“I’ve some chocolate, if you feel hungry.”
“Oh, no, thank you——”
“Go on. There’s plenty. I’m not crazy about it.”
Jill took off her hat and accepted the chocolate. It was a kind she liked. Her confusion and unpreparedness for this meeting were being slowly overcome by the grace and calmness that Minerva spread about her.
Minerva said directly:
“I hear you’ve had some bad news. I’m very sorry; if there’s anything I can do to help, I should be only too pleased.”
Her voice was so soft and clear that Jill never thought about crying.
“Thanks—no, there’s nothing to do, now.”
“I’m very sorry,” said Minerva again.
“It was all very unexpected. He had ’flu—and it turned to pneumonia—and it seems he hadn’t any strength to resist it. He’s been overworking.”
“That’s very sad, very sad indeed.”
Suddenly Jill burst into tears. She turned her face away and looked down at her lap. Minerva paid no attention, only saying after a pause:
“You must be feeling very miserable: I’m sorry I brought the subject up. But you will have to get used to it, you know.”
“Oh, it’s not that. You don’t understand. I know everyone has to die. It’s the thought of having to waste one’s life in awful places like school.…”
“Oh, don’t you like school?”
“No!”
“Have you no friends?”
“No.”
“Not one?”
“Not a real one.” Jill stopped crying and looked at Minerva wretchedly. “What am I going to do?”
“I don’t know. Stick it out, I should say. Things will get better.”
“Everyone thinks I’m stuck-up.”
“Everyone thinks I’m stuck-up.”
“Oh, but they don’t—and you aren’t! No, you’re different!” cried Jill impulsively. “And, anyway, it doesn’t matter with you—you’re so far beyond them, you can get on without anyone else—but I can’t, though I’ve tried; I’ve watched you and tried——”
Minerva raised her eyebrows.
“What a queer thing to say,” she said coolly.
Jill suddenly swallowed her emotion and bit back more open confessions that were to follow, recognizing instantly that Minerva had administered a gentle rebuff. She was ashamed of herself. She saw that Minerva had indicated that her detachment, even though it was admired, must still be respected; that loneliness was not to be abandoned at the first chance of friendship, but was a thing to be cherished in itself. She sat silent for the rest of the journey. Once Minerva offered her more chocolate, which she took.
The stone gate-pillars loomed through the fog, and they began to put on their hats. “I hope you get on all right,” said Minerva, smiling pleasantly at Jill. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you, won’t you?” The taxi stopped. “And tell Miss Badger you’ve arrived—I must stop and pay the driver.”
Jilll got out of the taxi, glad to stretch her cramped legs. Taking her small suitcase in one hand, she walked up the steps to the front door and went in. Minerva turned to the driver, with money in her hand. Seeing Jill hesitate at the door, she smiled and waved briefly. Jill remembered that her father was dead.
But on reading it through a day later, he was disappointed that it was so little of what he had desired. It seemed to present nothing of the Jill he knew; indeed, it blurred her image rather than anything else, and thinking what it lacked was intimacy, he searched through all the stationers in the town till he found a diary for the current (though almost spent) year. This he began to keep for her, concocting entries day by day, not surprised at the ease with which he wrote them.
TUESDAY. Oh, a horrid day. Horrid and hateful! Now the novelty’s worn off (and it wears off damned quickly in these days) I’m getting to hate it as much as ever. All my kirbi-grips had vanished for a start this morning (yes, and WHO took them?), so what with searching for them and trying to find a slide, I hadn’t time to get my hymn-book before prayers—and of course the Badger had to choose today to inspect them, as she said she’d seen too many girls sharing recently. I suppose she thinks I like sharing with Molly. Anyway, the upshot is I’ve got “Eternal Father Strong to Save” to write out three times. Then Jennings put me on in Latin just at the very line I’d broken off to listen to Jackie talking about her sister (the actress) and got a black mark for that—“You least of all, Jill, can afford to waste time.…” Then, oh well, then it was sausages for dinner, which I’m convinced give me spots. And object drawing in the afternoon, with the highly-inspiring object being a pair of steps. I rubbed mine out so much that Miss Shore said: “Well, underneath the dirt, Jill, I dare say it’s an excellent drawing, but not seeing, can’t say.” Everyone laughed, so I said: “I think the paper is of rather cheap quality.…”
WEDNESDAY. This is supposed to be a half-holiday, but I was roped in for compulsory-voluntary-compulsory gardening, in consequence of which I have a blister on my hand which is why this writing’s so bad. That’s the trouble with this place—nothing is private. This ghastly spirit of keenness—always rushing to or from a place, getting marks for this or stripes for that or prizes for the other. It keeps me continually on edge, ready to fly out at anybody. “Our little spitfire, Jill,” as Jennings puts it (I must get so that I can say that quite calmly).
THURSDAY. I must be honest and say I don’t like Keats as much as Dowson. The O to A, for instance—“their clammy cells”.… Ugh! People’s hands. “Wailful choir”—“hilly bourn”—so old-fashioned, which is a silly thing to say, I suppose. And then “burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine”—apart from reminding me of Joy Roberts, always makes me think of dentists and false teeth.
Must stop now. I always think it’s a good comment on this place that I have to write my diary locked in the lavatories.…
FRIDAY. Today we were messing about in the Hall during break because it was raining, and I caught sight of myself in the glass of one of the pictures. Quite a shock—just another tunic, blouse and tie. Me from the Outside. And this is Me from the Inside? No, on the whole I don’t think so, not the real me; not like when I’m riding Toby in a “wordless ecstasy”, or listening to the Faery Song from the Immortal Hour.…
SATURDAY. Another loathsome day, all through Delia. Why the hell should we have to sit in alphabetical order? I hate her more than I’ve ever hated anyone else in my whole life. I hate her stupid fat face and her fringe. I hate her clumsy untidiness—the way she can’t write without bending her forefinger concave on the penholder. In Maths today we had geometry, and she hadn’t got a pencil. She asked me for one—I’d only got a new Venus, and said so. Before I could stop her, she said “That’ll do,” snatched it away from me, broke it in half and gave me back the half without a point. I tried to hit her in the face, and we scuffled a bit so that old B. peered round and chanted some kind of warning to us. Why can’t the old fool keep order? I was absolutely trembling with fury and couldn’t see for tears. I hadn’t got a penknife to sharpen the bit I had, and I knew
that I should burst out crying if I asked anyone to lend me one, because it was a special pencil out of the box Daddy gave me for last Christmas, and I’d really brought it back to do some sketching. I just sat staring at the page until old B. came round and saw that I hadn’t done anything. Then the fat was au feu. I told her I hadn’t got a pencil, and she said that was no reason, I could have borrowed one. I said I didn’t feel well. “You were well enough to be fighting ten minutes back,” she said. “I wasn’t fighting,” I said, and burst out crying, raging and loathing myself and wanting to kill the whole crowd of them. Luckily the bell went.
LATER. She—Delia—’s kept on at me. She’s noticed I spend ages in the lats every night (writing this, of course, but she won’t believe that) and goes about telling everyone. I wish this place were burnt to the ground with everyone in it.
SUNDAY. The day of rest, I don’t think. Too furious to write more.
MONDAY. Got told off today, and really nobody seems to think I shall get my school cert. I don’t myself. Why can’t one go and live quietly away from this pack of guttersnipes and fools?
TUESDAY. A queer thing happened today. Miss Fairfax had a class of babes to look after as well as us, and they were in the next room, sewing. She told me—ME!—to go in and read to them, and literally put me in charge of a whole class of twenty babes. I was so surprised that I was hardly nervous at all, and read them a fairy story about a woodcutter’s daughter who lived in the Depths of the Woods (lucky beast). I put loads of expression into it, so that they were quite thrilled, and every now and then I had to tell them to get on with their kettle-holders and hair-tidies and pin-cushions, they were just listening with open mouths. But they got their cottons into such hideous tangles that I had to keep stopping to help them, and in the end I just let them sit round and listen till the period ended. They were entranced. At one point I felt a horrid pang for my own lost youth and salad days—but really I’m not sorry at all. I mean I know things will get worse and worse, but I don’t mind because they’ll get better and better too. I wouldn’t go back, not for millions.…
They weren’t so bad today.
Then he was troubled because the rest of the diary was untouched, and he began trying to fill in the whole year with entries, hoping secretly to create one year of her life, that he could amplify with little poems about spring and autumn and letters of thanks for birthday and Christmas presents. But it meant transposing the story he had written, and this tired him, and then he grew confused about chronology, and suddenly the whole thing seemed vapid and uninteresting. He had not moved one inch nearer creating an independent Jill; all he had done was to model himself on her image. And doing so had pushed the image from his mind. Try as he would, he could not coax a picture of her to materialize, though at first they had come so easily.
The final possession came one day at lunch, when he was quietly eating bread and cheese and listening to casual talk among the scholars, some of whom were discussing the sinking of the Jervis Bay. He sat spellbound, holding his knife, his heart beating loudly. The sensation he had was of looking intently into the centre of a pure white light: he seemed to see the essence of Jill, around which all the secondary material things formed and reformed as he wrote them down. He thought he saw exactly what she was and how he should express it: the word was innocent, one he had used dozens of times in his own mind, and yet until that moment had never understood.
He rose, leaving a crust of brown bread and some cheese still uneaten, eager to get back to pen and paper, but as he reached the door another student came up to him and began talking persuasively about the activities of some political club. The young man had red hair and enormously broad shoulders. John shifted in suspense, longing to get away.
“But I don’t know anything about——”
“Then you’re exactly the kind of person the club is meant for. You see, this is the way we look at it. We students have certain advantages here—advantages that we’ve worked for, perhaps—but at any rate advantages that put us in the position of being able to get a grip on affairs. A lot of fellows of our age are working in factories or in the services, and have no free time at all. We have, and I think you’ll agree that it’s up to us to put it to good use. We’ve got libraries, a good supply of speakers, and even in the short time we get up here now it’s possible—I know it’s possible—to learn enough about the past and present in order to avoid making a mess of the future when the time comes for us to be citizens.”
“Yes, but——”
“We have the central club, you see, the main club with meetings every week to discuss questions of immediate general interest, when we get a speaker of pretty good reputation, as a rule. You’ll have seen the posters——”
“Oh, yes, but——”
“But in addition to that, we try to do something on our own. So many clubs just meet every week in order to be talked at—I won’t mention any names, but you probably know the kind I mean. Now we subdivide into college groups—each college, you see, has a discussion group and every term each group takes a certain question and examines it from all angles. Different members take different aspects. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that our College group is discussing India. Then I take, say, the administration; you might take the aims and methods of the Nationalist Party; someone else would take the different religious bodies and their different political attitudes, and so on and so forth. In this way we get what is virtually a team of experts, each one making it his business to know all he possibly can about his particular subject. And we all pool our knowledge by reading a paper to the rest of the group each.”
“I——”
“Already, you see, you’re not just a rank-and-file member of the club—for that term you are the specialist on whatever particular subject you’ve been studying, and can pull the speaker up at club meetings if he goes off the rails. You have some sort of a position already. You see, we try to do something.”
“Yes, I see, but——”
“And after all, who is going to do it if we don’t? When this war’s over, there’s going to be an enormous demand for well-informed, intelligent people to run groups and hold meetings in order to see that the politicians don’t go and make the same old mistakes all over again. A sort of advance-guard of the new world order.”
“Er—I——”
“Now, won’t you come along to the open tea meeting this afternoon? We’re very lucky—the President is coming along to talk to new and prospective members.”
“Well—it all sounds most interesting.… Where will it be?”
“In my rooms—you know. You might like to bring along pencil and paper, or think up some questions to ask. The half-term subscription is two bob.”
“Yes—if I can—but I’ve got to go now—appointment——”
And he managed to slip away, half running out into the quadrangle before he realized that of course that extraordinary clarity of perception that had been vouchsafed him for a few moments had gone, utterly gone. When he had pencil and paper in his room, nothing presented itself to his mind except a flat dullness, like a grey stone wall, and sighing he put them down and lent back on the sofa with his hands behind his head.
Shortly afterwards Eddy looked in, wearing a tweed cap, which he took off and threw on to the table.
“Chris not in?”
“I think he’s playing squash——”
“Ah,” said Eddy, settling in the armchair. “Mind if I wait.”
He put an unlit cigarette between his loose lips and stretched his legs, so that one of his feet knocked against John’s ankle, an action for which he did not apologize. John put away Jill’s diary and, having buttoned up his overcoat, went wearily out, not knowing where he was going or for how long. In the College lodge there was a letter for him from the Dean of the College, inviting him to tea at his house on Sunday: John noticed an identical envelope for Whitbread also. He put it away in his pocket.
Everyone at the cinema seemed in t
wos, threes or fours and, despite himself, when the lights went up, he was thinking about Christopher and Elizabeth, half excusing the casual conversation he had overheard. He found it hard to recall the exact words, but had they, after all, been so insulting? Hadn’t they had some friendliness in them, patronizing, perhaps, but a certain good-humoured toleration? Elizabeth had not been round lately, for both she and Patrick had been occupied with some cousin who was staying in the town, so Christopher had occasionally chatted to John in a friendly manner and John had answered him quite affably and humbly. Perhaps the way they had spoken about him was the way they spoke about everybody; not significant of anything, but amiable amusement.
He felt as a child feels who has in a fit of temper run out of a game, and, looking round, watches the game still going on despite his absence, and is filled with a desire to rejoin it.
As he sat drinking tea in a cheap and rather dirty café, however, he experienced such a pang of absolute self-disgust that he wondered how he was going to live another hour. It was impossible to make friends with Christopher and Elizabeth, and that was the only thing he wanted to do, now that he had awoken hopelessly from his attempt to build a world around Jill. He knew that one more world had crumbled to bits under his hand. He paid a waitress in a grubby overall pinned at the hip, and walked out.
His footsteps turned naturally towards the College, but he remembered in time the political tea-meeting and stopped short. Ancient buildings were all around him; a few people in overcoats hurried this way and that; a girl on a bicycle fled by, as if escaping. A few cars were parked down the broad street and a dozen lights showed from a nearby college. A Negro passed him dressed in an enormous fur coat, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles and carrying an ivory walking-cane: John stood and stared vaguely after him, the wind stirring his hair, then with a sudden useless decision, he pushed open the glass-panelled door of a large bookshop, hoping to find something cheap enough for him to buy, and ready to enjoy the smell of the books, the electric light shining on glossy pages and the subdued tapping of a typewriter from behind an office door. He moved thoughtfully from shelf to shelf, here and there taking a book to inspect it, not enviously, but with a distant curiosity. From the desk came the clink of coins and polite murmured inquiries.
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