We reached home, and after a merciful tea we packed into our attic for a ‘criticism’. Remarks quite just and sensible were volunteered, but with the leniency one would expect from a condemned man for a fellow criminal. Many good points and a few weak ones had been observed in Miss Rogers, but when she had been ‘done’ Miss Hughes said: ‘I’m afraid we must regard the lesson given by Miss Thomas as a failure.’ The Headmistress had considered that I had a pleasant manner, but that was the only bright spot; the students’ criticisms were given reluctantly, but all the more deadly on that account. I needed my Growlery, and retired to lick my sores there. After a bit there was a tap on the door, and who should appear but Miss Hughes.
‘I was pleased,’ was her amazing remark, ‘that you made such a mess of your lesson.’ Then to my dumb astonishment she added: ‘I have noticed that people who are going to do really well—in almost any walk in life—nearly always start with a failure. I could tell from your notes that the lesson would be a bad one.’
‘Then why didn’t you…?’ I faltered.
‘Why didn’t I tell you to alter them? Well, you were beginning with a definition, instead of leading up to it. You could easily have recast your notes; but don’t you see that then the lesson would have been mine, not yours? Success so gained would have been very bad for you. As it is you have learnt for ever not to begin with a definition. And a lot of other things, too’, she added smiling. ‘No, I mustn’t sit down; no end of things to do—but I can tell you this, you will make an excellent teacher.’
The Growlery had justified its name.
It was a little later in the term that the room did its duty again. We were all of us ready to see the humorous side of everything. All except Miss Hay, the one student whose seriousness and matter-of-factness amounted to a joke in itself. She was neither foolish herself, nor did she see any folly in others, and gained the nickname of ‘La Haye Sainte’. One day she burst into the Growlery, without even stopping to knock, collapsed to the floor and exclaimed in tones of real heartbreak, ‘I am ruined’.
‘Come, come,’ said I, ‘Go to! How now Reynaldo!’ But seeing that these encouraging noises had no effect, I hoped for something really exciting, and said, ‘Tell me all’.
With great reluctance a girls’ private school had granted us the privilege of giving a few advanced lessons to the eldest class, and Miss Hughes was to be the only critic present. Hygiene was the subject suggested, and several lessons had gone smoothly enough when it fell to Miss Hay to give one on systems of drainage. She had written elaborate notes and was confident, and was solemnly getting on with her lecture, when suddenly, while in full cry about some U-shaped trap, her ignorance of the subject and her daring to instruct people about it, struck her as ridiculous, and she began to laugh. It was the first joke she had ever really felt. In vain she sought for some excuse for her lapse from propriety, but drains don’t lend themselves to amusing situations, and the more she tried to stop laughing the more incoherent with it she became. Miss Hughes rose and thrust a piece of paper into her hands, ‘Oh, Miss Hay, I have just remembered a most important message; will you take this at once to this address. I will carry on with your lesson for you, and tell the girls the funny story that I know you had in mind.’
The address was of course only that of the college, and poor Miss Hay had rushed home expecting instant dismissal, and flung herself into the Growlery. What was her surprise to find that it was not only I that laughed at her tragedy, but all the others too, even Miss Hughes herself, who told us that the girls had been quite unsuspicious of anything wrong. That incident was the making of Miss Hay, who was never thereafter the dull piece of conventionality she had once been.
In most schools we came to be welcomed, and in one case we were actually asked for. An urgent message came one day from the elementary school in Eden Street; two of the teachers were ill, and could Miss Hughes spare two of her students to take their place for an hour or two every morning for the next few days? Immediately two of us were picked out—Bessie Jones as being tall and imposing, and I as being game for any adventure. As soon as breakfast was over off we started in high spirits, not knowing in the least what would be expected of us, but glorying in the fact that the shortage of teachers would mean that there would be no one to supervise or criticize us. It was a lovely autumn morning and we were exhilarated by our walk and our new sense of responsibility. Surely no two teachers ever entered an elementary school more gaily.
We were heartily welcomed by the Headmistress, who showed us into a big room, with two large classes, side by side, and asked us to arrange the work as we liked between us. A cupboard with various piles of books for reading and arithmetic was at our disposal, and a timetable hung on the wall. But we were told that there was no need to stick to the timetable if we wished to do anything else. Then Bessie and I had a hurried consultation, agreeing to keep to the subjects on the timetable, but to treat them as freely as we felt inclined. We also arranged to begin at once, and change over the classes at the interval.
Our great asset was our having to ask the children what they had been doing last, which put us at once on a personal footing. The arithmetic was not beyond me, and I won their hearts by confessing what difficulty I had had in mastering the rule they were doing, and showing them a little dodge I had invented for doing it quickly. After this a reading lesson was plain sailing, and I dared to ask questions, getting a forest of eager hands thrust up in response, with the incessant sound of ‘teesh’ to implore my ear. I glanced across the room to smile at Bessie, who was having a like experience. At the interval she and I considered that we might launch out more freely for the ensuing lessons. So I boldly asked my class what they liked best. ‘Please Miss a story.’ Thereupon I plunged into the Greek legends, and kept these going throughout our stay, discreetly wedging them in between bits of dictation and arithmetic. Bessie had found that reciting poetry to them had been equally entrancing, and for one joyful period she took the whole two classes together for a singing lesson. To this day Bessie and I look back to those hours of scratch lessons as a red-letter spot.
In order to increase our limited chances of practice in teaching we were given the task of lecturing to one another. One evening a week a student had to stand up in our attic and deliver a lecture of an hour’s length, without a single note, to Miss Hughes and the rest. My subject was the eleven years tyranny under Charles I, and I spent so much trouble over it that I know quite a lot about it even now. The audience was more critical than any other I have experienced, but what a tonic the criticism was! Miss Hughes maintained that severe criticism was the highest compliment that could be paid to anyone. ‘The more carefully you prepare your work,’ she would say, ‘the more I can pull you to pieces, because you give me something to go upon.’ And the value of simple clearness of style she brought home to us by relating what had been said of Henry Sidgwick: ‘He has not only got to the bottom of his subject, but he has come up again.’
VII. The Furies Amuse Themselves
§ 1
THE worst blight on the teaching profession is the woman who can think and talk nothing but shop. Men are not so bad. But on the Continent there are to be met women by the score whose sole purpose in visiting Bruges or Venice appears to be to find material for lessons to the Upper Fourth. The disease was not so rife in the eighties, but the narrowness of outlook was a danger just the same, and Miss Hughes continually pressed upon us the prime necessity for a teacher to have some bigger interest in her life than merely passing on (however ably) her own acquisitions to her pupils. ‘Nothing inspires children more,’ she would say, ‘than to be aware that their teacher is engrossed in some big subject that is beyond them; and nothing produces contempt more surely than the notion that her main interest lies in their little successes and failures.’
It was in accordance with this principle that so many visitors were invited to the college at meal-times, to mix with us in an informal way, as well as to give us a talk on their own
besetting subject, with no ulterior motive of its ‘coming in useful’.
All our meal-times, whether enriched by visitors or not, were entirely free from ‘shop’ and were occasions for general conversation and jollity. I can remember nothing of the food we had except the marmalade and the butter, around which there were legends. We were told that marmalade was called ‘squish’ and that every undergraduate was expected to eat his weight in it during his time at Cambridge. One of Dym’s rare bits of information to me had been that butter was sold by the yard; but this I had put down to a mere leg-pull. What was my astonishment, therefore, to find it literally true, and to see on the first breakfast table little four-inch rolls about one inch in diameter. Unfortunately the butter was not very good, and we ate rather sparingly of it. Except one student (Irish, needless to say), who disliked it so much that she ate great chunks of it in order to get rid of it! We pointed out to her that if it disappeared like that our housekeeper would think we were quite pleased with it and would buy still more. ‘I can’t help it,’ said she, ‘I can’t bear the sight of it.’
Newnham and Girton were naturally very hospitable to us, owing to Miss Hughes’s acquaintances in the one, and old North Londoners in the other. My first visit to each was memorable. At Newnham Miss Clough was Principal, and as she had been one of the chief promoters of our little college she looked upon us as god-children, and invited us all to tea with her on our first Sunday. I took in little of the glories of Newnham, being entirely absorbed in admiration of its gracious Head. I was in that green condition when one fancies that a poet must be dead, even if he ever trod the earth at all; and here, handing tea to me and humanly smiling was actually the sister of a poet whom mother had so often quoted to me. ‘To veer how vain, on, onward strain’, and ‘But Westward, look, the land is bright’ were running in my head all the time, and I was impatient to get home to write to mother about my visit.
My first voyage to Girton was more alarming, because I went alone and had a long walk to get nervous in. And the big buildings overawed me. But dash it all, I thought, it is only Mary Worley I am going to tea with, and I have done that at home heaps of times. Of course she was just the same dear old Mary Worley in her room at Girton as she had been in Canonbury. ‘I have invited the jolliest of my friends to meet you,’ said she, introducing a Miss Ramsay. Jolly was the word for her, and I had not a rag of nervousness left. Fortunately for our gaiety I had no idea of the ultra-distinguished classic she was to become—the only one in the first class in the Tripos. Faithful readers of Punch will recall the picture of her entering a railway carriage labelled ‘First Class: for Ladies Only’.
In order to cure us of nervous ‘tongue-tie’, every Thursday after dinner two of us were selected to take coffee in Miss Hughes’s private room, to meet one or more of her men friends. I was never put through this ordeal, and conclude that it was because tongue-tie was not among my failings, on the contrary I was always one of the few who were besought (before a lecture from a stranger) to think up one or more intelligent questions when discussion was invited; in short, to use Miss Hughes’s own expression, to make fools of ourselves for the public good.
However, it was the apparently strait-laced Miss Buss who took the boldest step in giving us a chance to meet men in a social way. She gave a real ball. The guests in the main were her own old pupils at Newnham and Girton, and their brothers and friends who were ‘up’. A hall in the town was hired with, of course, a dance-band, and all of us were invited. Alarm was our first reaction, for the question of what we could wear was a pressing one with most of us. But Miss Hughes assured us that our dinner-frocks would do quite well. Bessie Jones firmly refused to go. Her dress, by the wildest flight of imagination, could not be called an ‘evening’ one; but her ostensible reason for refusal was her objection to dancing; she was a nonconformist and had been brought up to regard it as sinful. But after Miss Hughes had made some convincing references to David’s behaviour before the Ark, and a fellow student had shown how her dress could be transmogrified, she was ready to join the rest of us as we got into the four-wheelers. A dark rumour had been spread among us that it took four girls to extract a single word from an undergraduate. But as for myself I had had so much experience with my brothers and their friends that I had no fear of any young men, and hoped that by continual smiling and talking I should be able to distract their attention from my inadequate evening dress.
This was the first dance with grown-up and entirely strange young men that I had ever been to, and I found it most exhilarating. My knowledge of the right steps was confined to a polka and a schottische, for although we had had plenty of dancing at home I had usually been requisitioned to play the piano for the others. However, I managed to get on fairly well, and even ventured on a waltz with one young man, who assured me that he would take me round all right if I just gave to the music and didn’t attempt to do the correct step. And lo, it was so. He then asked me to sit out the next dance. This Peterhouse man and I found so much in common and had such a lot to say that we sat out the following dance, too. While we were chatting another undergraduate passing us exclaimed, ‘I say, Mary, how you are going it!’ I suppose my partner noticed how uncomfortably I blushed, and guessed that my name was Mary, for he hurriedly explained, ‘You see they call me Mary—short for my name—Marillier.’
When we got home the others teased me about Mr. Marillier, and I said: ‘Well, I shall never see him again, so what matter?’ By a strange coincidence I came full tilt upon him the very next day in Trinity Street as we were going to a lecture in the Divinity Schools. Out of sheer annoyance at having been teased I looked at him as though he were a complete stranger. I shall never forget his look of surprise, and often wished I could meet him again to explain. It was a healthy warning to me never to tease anyone in that foolish way.
Later on Cambridge was all asplash about a Greek play, to be performed by undergraduates, with only one woman actor, a Miss Case, to take the part of Athene in the Eumenides. Miss Buss and satellites were coming up for it. We were told what a wonderful chance it was; a Greek play might never come our way again; education and all that. Seats, ten shillings each. I wrote to mother and asked if she could possibly raise it, or if she thought the play wouldn’t be worth it anyhow. The money came at once with insistence that I must go. Throughout the performance disappointment, anger, and boredom seized me in turn. That anything Greek could be so dull was my first surprise; then as it got still duller, anger at the loss of mother’s good ten shillings took the field; then boredom overcame all other feelings, at last became unbearable, and I fell asleep. I believe the others did, too, for they were peculiarly reticent about the play when we got home; all except Bessie Davies, who had amused herself by counting the Eumenides, and found that they were fourteen—the same number as ourselves; and as they seemed to rush about to business or pleasure in the same sort of wild way that we did, we adopted the name, and ever afterwards referred to our little band as ‘The Furies’.
It is greatly to Miss Hughes’s credit that she took us for an expedition on the river. We could guess from the expression on her face while we were in the boats that her anxiety was extreme, and she admitted afterwards that she would never have so embarked, had not her determination always been never to allow her nervousness to prevent her doing what was worthwhile. We were asked which of us could row, and I immediately volunteered. I had never done any rowing, but it looked so easy; I had watched men on the river, and all they did was to put in the oar leaning forwards, lean backwards and pull it out. If Miss Hughes had known what mother used to say of me, ‘She would offer to command the Channel Fleet if required’, her nervousness would have increased. ‘Crabs!’ she cried soon after we had started, ‘why, it’s lobsters you’re catching! Fortunately a few of us did know how to row, but even so, how those two boatloads returned in safety is a standing marvel to me.
Our everyday relaxations were really more enjoyable than those carefully planned for us. In all ki
nds of weather we would be out between lunch and tea. In groups of two or three we would explore the colleges and the Backs. I gained a certain respect from having had a brother at Jesus, and showed the others its grounds and chapel as if they belonged to me. We looked with awe at any Dons walking about, and once a man was pointed out to us as ‘the only one who is able to imagine a fourth dimension’. I thought to myself, How do they know he can imagine it? They’ve only his word for it; I might just as well say that I could. We looked with curiosity at Oscar Browning, for we knew the famous quatrain beginning, ‘O.B. oh be obedient….’
More attractive even than the Backs and the bridges were the real country walks—either one that took an hour, or a longer round that took more than two hours—called respectively the Little Grind and the Big Grind. From these we would come back hot and healthy, laden with branches of autumn berries and leaves to decorate our rooms. One afternoon, when the weather had grown colder, Miss Rogers suggested an expedition to climb the Gog Magogs, and six or seven of us fell in with the idea. She appointed a meeting-place on the other side of the town, and there we all met after percolating through the streets in driblets. I had heard a good deal about mountain climbing, and was looking forward to some tough work. Leaving the town we agreed to walk in a comfortable bunch together, and so make a merry party of it. To beguile the way one of us suggested a new kind of game. Each in turn selected a fellow student, and told her quite plainly her besetting fault. It grew exciting, for many an unsuspected foible was brought to light. If there had been such a word then, we should have called our game ‘psycho-analysis’. There was much fun over little tricks and mannerisms, but after a bit I sensed that some of us were feeling a little sore, so I hailed Miss Rogers—‘Where are these Gog Magogs that we hear so much about?’ ‘Why, we’ve been over them some time ago,’ was the reply, ‘and are now well on our way home. Didn’t you know that to see the view in Cambridge you need only get up on a chair?’ I never look at those poor little hills now without recalling my disgust at their size, and the fault of character that was usefully brought home to me that afternoon.
A London Girl of the Eighties Page 12