9
The Deed Was Extreme
On the eight-thirteen boat in the morning, which most of the office-workers took to the city, Terry Hawkins sat always with two girls from her own part of the Bay; Martha, who had been a stenographer for eleven years in a tyre salesroom, and Elsie, who worked a Moon’s accounting machine. Martha was a pale, sedate, but spirited brunette, with wiry hair, long pious nose, and stiff purple mouth. She had been engaged for five years to a clerk in the Treasury Department and was always urging him to pass some examination or other, while they saved up to get married. When they had two hundred pounds she would leave work and they would marry. It was not considered respectable among these girls to work after marriage; a girl was supposed to find a man who would keep her, and if she worked after marriage, it was a reflection on man and wife alike. This was Martha’s entire theory of marriage. Since she had first got her job at the age of fifteen she had been making her trousseau, which now filled a tea-chest and a trunk. This alone marked her out as a woman with strength of mind; for the law of the boat was that while every girl might start on her trousseau, that is publicly, two or three mornings after her engagement, even her secret engagement, provided her secret engagement was properly given to rumour, a girl was vapid, a dreamer, silly, even pretentious, who worked on her trousseau (in these circumstances called glory-box, bottom drawer, or hope chest) before her engagement. This was observed so strictly that any girl doing sewing on the boat was believed to have a secret engagement to marry.
A girl, before the diamond ring, belonged to Martha’s category of the Great Unwanted. Martha was the wit of the party, a village gossip of the forbidding, dangerous, upright, churchly kind, with a rapid, penetrating eye, who could strip a congregation down to its underlinen and who, completely integrated, feared neither man nor God; to the latter she gave lip service. Martha was respected over the whole boat, on the female side, for her ability to first guess how love affairs were going; who was about to leave, who about to return to, the Great Unwanted. For this reason, Martha held herself apart, and had only two regulars, that is comrades: Teresa, who was neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring, and Elsie, a natural adjutant. Teresa’s other friend, this Elsie, was also an Engaged Girl. She had been in tutelage to Martha for eight years and after four years she got the ring. She was a dark, slow-voiced, simple-hearted girl who loved accountancy, and was nearing the end of her engagement. She was going to give up work, too, but she said she was going to miss the office, she knew. From time to time she put a few stitches in a piece of sewing, but she did not care much for it; she dreamed the hours away on the boat. Martha chattered without end and Elsie would sit back with drooping shoulders, her eyes shining, a soft expression round her lips. Sometimes Martha’s eyes would tire of sewing, and then the two girls would sit devouring fiction, “outwardly passive, inside a seething volcano”, in Aunt Bea’s description. Teresa, belonging as yet to the Great Unwanted, could not, of course, do any sewing. She bent over her book. Beside her, through the churning of the screws, the whsh-to, whsh-to of the open engine and the gush of water, she would hear their intimate give-and-take, a discussion of some book.
“What do you think of Laurette, as a character?”
“I think she’s true to life.”
“I don’t think any girl would say what she said to Mr Vansittart under the circumstances. She doesn’t know him well enough yet.”
Occasionally, they came out of their private life to poke their noses into Teresa’s affairs. She would show her book at once, anxious to explain it. Martha always wanted a résumé of it, Elsie listened because Martha wanted her to. Martha was implacable.
“But painters just paint. They don’t think out all that! Why is it called Dawn? How can dawn possibly look like a woman? When is Man a pentagon? Why can’t Prometheus have clothes on? We have monkeys now, did a man ever come from them? How do we know the sun goes round the earth? They have globes and things, but how do they know? You can’t prove it, can you? You merely accept what they say in school.”
This Monday morning, going in to school, Teresa had with her Louys’s Aphrodite and Ovid’s Art of Love, illustrated. The two girls, while not daring to touch the books, considered them, on Teresa’s lap, with a mixture of shame and curiosity. This, too, she had to explain and even to speak for. Martha, the implacable, said: “Are they really classics? Why do they have such things for classics? How do you know people did them in the olden days? Supposing they wrote down such things, why do we have to read them? What is the purpose of printing them so expensively? What are they read for? If you don’t have to read them, why do you? Do you like reading that?”
Teresa said: “Everything in the world was produced by the act of love, it would be queer not to think about it,” but so wrapped up were they in husbands-to-be, they seemed never to have heard of love. They knew all the scandals in the newspapers, of course, and much about whether Mrs X was found on the lap of Mr Y or not. For all the men they had names: boy friends, fiancés, husbands, and co-respondents, and there were flirts, engaged couples, married couples, and misconduct, but they recoiled at the improper words, love and lover.
“Doesn’t the word—lover, I mean,” said Martha, at length, faintly disturbed, “seem indecent to you? I mean, sweetheart is better, or fiancé is better.”
“Lover!” cried Teresa, shocked out of her exposition. “Lover is the only word there is.”
“You want a husband, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t you want a man to marry you and keep you?”
“I’d work my fingers to the bone to keep my lover,” she said violently. “I’d live in a tent, what do I care about a house?”
“A nice thing that would be. I’m afraid the world couldn’t run your way.”
Teresa laughed angrily. Martha picked up her book and tried to return to the page she had wandered from, but something still attracted her to Teresa. She looked sidelong at her for a moment, and asked: “What is your ambition?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Don’t you want to get married?”
“Of course.”
“Wouldn’t you wear an engagement ring?” said Martha, attacked by a rare doubt.
“No,” said Teresa timidly.
“Why not?”
“Love doesn’t consist in publicity!”
Martha looked at her with disfavour.
“When you are engaged, you will understand,” said Elsie kindly, meaning to save her from further attack, for Martha’s face was dark. Said Elsie, with an effort: “I didn’t understand either, till I was engaged. I thought the same.”
“Why wouldn’t you want anyone to know?” said Martha suspiciously.
“What business is it of theirs?”
“Why would you be ashamed?”
“It isn’t shame.”
“Love,” said Martha bluntly, looking her up and down. “What do you know about love? Have you got a young man?”
“No.”
“Then it’s all simply theory,” said Martha indignantly. “How can you talk about what you don’t understand?”
“Surely I can understand about love without being engaged?”
“It’s a funny thing if you can, something I wouldn’t talk about if I were you!”
Teresa grew angry. “Oh, and what do you know, being engaged?”
Immediate the two girls assumed sage expressions; age-old smiling wisdom sat on their lips, Martha’s hairy and Elsie’s smooth.
“Being engaged—when you are beginning life with a man and everything is before you, everything seems quite different,” said Martha.
“You have something to live for,” said Elsie. “Otherwise you have nothing to live for. Oh, Teresa,” she exclaimed in sudden simple rapture, “isn’t it true?”
Starched Martha was silent, a little perturbed and hungry.
“I sent for those books,” said the other, ardently. “You know, what we were talking a
bout, How She Became a Happy Bride and The Secrets of Men’s Love, and they did send them under plain cover. My mother gave them to me.” She leaned forward and her sweet, puffing breath came to Teresa: “And what they say is true, but they taught me so much I did not know,” and shyly, she looked at her friend. “All that they say is true.”
Martha said tartly: “Yes, but you got engaged before, didn’t you, so what did you want them for?”
“Look,” said Teresa, “after you get engaged and after you get married, you have to know things. For example, Aphrodite, in this book, when she bathed, used herbs to scent the water.”
“What for?” said Martha, needling her with a look.
“To smell nice.”
“I am afraid I don’t think those things count in marriage,” said Martha. “Marriage is different altogether.”
The two other girls were downcast.
The day was like all days. The frantic old woman with bird’s-nest hair who taught Lower Third slashed the boys’ legs with a ruler, although it was against the law, and no one told on her because she had gone queer. The young brunette with Upper Third said the life was rotten and if any woman could get out of it by marriage, she ought to, no matter what the man was like; she’d take anybody herself. The jolly married teacher of Fourth, ungraded, and on lowest pay because she was a married woman, an old hand, did her embroidery, slapped her brats with her open hand and chuckled at Teresa’s crowd.
“You certainly have a nice lot, especially that boy, George Wadling. I don’t say I envy you, though you’ve got a lot to learn before you’re finished. Bad blood in their veins, you’ll do nothing for them; all that comes from heredity, bad blood, the parents are no good.”
The woman of thirty-five with faded fair hair grumbled incessantly about her feet, about not sleeping with her “arthuritis”, the inspectors, new methods which they expected to see, and the notes mothers sent her by the children. Sitting blowsily in the teachers’ room, standing dully in the playground, patronizing, wretched, dull, deaf to hope and with no thought of a way out, they groused helplessly, in their own minds condemned to servitude for life—till sixty-five—and they might go queer before, like the old woman in Lower Third, especially if they remained, as desired by the Department, unmarried.
“You’re not alive yet, my girl,” said jolly Mrs Keeling, at her embroidery. “Wait till you’ve been kid-whacking for twenty years, then you’ll know that the children of good parents are good youngsters, smart, prompt, and the kids of that sort can never be any good. I don’t see what good you think you’re doing. Wouldn’t you rather have a class of normal youngsters, where you could see some improvement? Besides, you can’t get round those young monkeys! I had that Stephen for two years. Yes, you don’t know what life is.”
“I don’t know,” said the faded blonde, wretchedly. “Perhaps she does.”
“What does it matter who she teaches, she’s only in till she can get a man to take her out of it,” said the brunette, a lively youngish woman of twenty-eight who liked to wear white and red. “Aren’t we all? The kids don’t give twopence for us, why should we wear ourselves out over them?”
“I hate it, I hate it,” said the fair woman, rocking herself. “If I can only keep the kids down, I don’t care if they never learn a line. That Milly Brown came in with a note from her mother again this morning about ink on her dress. I wish some of the mothers had to take care of my class for a whole day.”
“I wish that, too,” said Mrs Keeling. “They’d wake up.”
Teresa burst out with: “Why do you stay in it if you hate it so much? I can’t go now for I would have to repay the Government my training expenses, but you have all been teaching for years, and are free.” There was a pained silence, then the brunette said: “What else can we do? The pay’s good, where else would you get it? They can’t throw you out. I don’t know how to do anything else, do you?”
Teresa said: “No, but I’m learning stenography.”
“Good for you,” said the white-and-red.
The blonde woman sighed: “Who would be here at kid-whacking if they could do anything else? Oh, gosh, I’m on playground duty, where’s the list?” The bell rang, they picked up their purses and exercise-books and hurried out. Teresa had a classroom between Mrs Keeling and the woman who had gone queer, Miss Abbott. The shaded path where her children collected led straight to this room, through a corridor, so that no one saw her children at any time, except through the two glass partitions of the neighbouring classes.
George Wadling, the Mad Boy, was again late, dirty and noisy. He came rushing into the room, shutting the door with a bang which startled the classes on both sides. He shambled grotesquely into his seat, a comic act, pretending not to see the pot-plant on the teacher’s desk. When he was sent out, to come in again properly, he stayed out. As he was lurking in the corridor, Headmaster Parrott came prowling along, in his soft, shining shoes, and saw the imp up to his tricks. Parrott was seized with irritation; he had beaten the rascal many times, in the street he had heard George caterwauling after him, shrieking his name with hate and contempt. The slender, genteel man had a blood-hatred of the boy. He talked about him freely, in his presence, to upper-class children, teachers, and inspectors, predicted the penitentiary or madhouse for him and deliberately dogged the boy, hating him.
Although glad to have the feeble-minded children taken out of his classes, he had at the same time a feeling of bafflement; and he had begun to hate the supervisor, Teresa’s friend, who meddled in the affairs of his school. Every boy in the defective class, even the pretty little deaf one, had tasted his stick. He knew the use of the stick, too, and was prepared to defend it against departmental rulings and murmurings of under-teachers; no use being mild with the little roughs from slum homes; it would be better not to teach them at all, but put them to hewing wood and drawing water.
Dr Smith, Teresa’s supervisor, a tall and large man, a former footballer, was too big to think of hitting such children but he had no interest in them; his object in starting a community for them was to take them out of the classes so that they would not clog the progress of the normal children. A few years would be filled in, enough to enable them to fill in their names on slips of paper and count money, and then they would be “put to hewing wood and drawing water”; this was his idea too. “There must be some who do these jobs,” he said, “and these unfortunates are as if designated by nature for it.”
For several weeks, Headmaster Parrott had not seen George Wadling during school hours, though he had been able to catch up with him in the playground, when he was at his tricks, and to assault him with a cuff or a kick, during recess. Before that the Mad Boy had spent most of his time during school hours in the playground dawdling between the queer old woman’s class and the headmaster’s, between running away from school and being fetched back, creating diversions by entering the wrong classes with a silly grin, being sent to the headmaster again with a normal pupil as gendarme, and so forth. And now, for weeks, no sign of Georgie! Parrott missed him; his cutting jokes were getting rusty. No longer he and the giants of the Sixth Class trembled and roared with laughter as he whizzed down with his cane and a sneer at the same time. Parrott the Disciplinarian he called himself, and he repeatedly told the teachers under him that there was only one method in teaching and that was to hold the class down. “The rest is frills for romantic inspectors.” His career in the schools, very successful, because he was young, was built on this principle.
George had been crouching at the door, alternately scowling and grinning at his hilarious classmates within. The headmaster, coming stealthily up behind, seized his prey. Cuffing him soundly about the head and shoulders and giving him a punch in the middle of the back, the headmaster helped him forward with a kick. Georgie ground his teeth and turned his wild fighting face to the man, lashing out at him with his squared fists. The headmaster kicked him two or three times, opening the door meanwhile, and dragged him into the room. Holding him
there by one fist and his collar, he turned to the young teacher with a clean gleam of satisfaction. He shone with clerkly success from head to foot. Georgie, stained, weeping, in an old Norfolk suit of no colour at all, so queered was it by rain and dirt, had given in.
“Is he giving you trouble, Miss Hawkins? Is George Wadling misbehaving?” he asked gallantly, smiling at the girl. “Because if he is, I can deal with him, just send him to me, we’re old friends, we understand each other, George Wadling and I. I know George pretty well and his tricks, and I won’t let him give you any trouble.”
Towards the end of his little speech, he clouded over and now looked down at the sullen child sharply. “You hear! I’ll cane you to within an inch of your life, my friend, if you start any of your monkey tricks here. We’ve got you here to try and help you a bit, but if you give this nice young lady any of your smartness, do you hear, you’ll hear of it from me at the end of a stick.”
He let the boy go. George did not move and had to be pushed two or three times before he trudged to his seat, which was in front. He sat down on it sullenly and managed to knock his books on the floor while doing so. Parrott let out a warning which caused him to pick them up again. As he piled them, he dropped one of them again. He now sat staring glumly and rather hopelessly in front of him. After a few more words, the headmaster footed it out in his neat style and politely closed the door. He was seen the next minute gossiping about the incident to Mrs Keeling, this large and untidy woman acting maternal benevolence with him.
Teresa’s class was crushed, all their unsteady wits shaken like butterflies in a gale.
“Open your book, George,” said Teresa, faintly, to the boy. He opened it with a bang and sat staring before him, his elbows on the desk, his lips hanging.
He was ruined. Miss Hawkins was with the enemy, protected by the enemy, who sidled up and danced down and smoodged around, but was lurking somewhere to tear his flesh with kicks and beat in his skull. George, who had a very timid, fitful intelligence over his books, was not to be fooled like his classmates upon the characters of persons; he made his own living in the streets, found his own bed. He had no friends in the class; while the poor things were flattered to have a famous criminal with them, they were frightened by his outrages and hid behind the skirt of good behaviour. Only one person understood him in the least; this was Joe Calton, a newsboy of ten, starved and dirty, of course, classified as feeble-minded but bright and lively in the streets. Joe also lived in the streets and often bedded down there. He showed his sympathy by getting up and saying brightly: “George will go to the reform school, Mr Parrott says,” because the reform school hung over them all with its terror; even the normal and respectable little girls in the playground talked of it with dread.
For Love Alone Page 14