Parson's Nine

by Noel Streatfeild

  Catherine sighed. Miss Crosby’s passion of feeling, over what to her seemed a foolish and unimportant point, touched her.

  “I’m sorry, Crossy, dear, but I’m afraid it’s impossible. Even if I could get her father to consent, which he never would, I’m afraid it would be out of the question from a financial point of view. With five boys to educate, preparatory schools, public schools, Oxford, and not one of them with the brains to get a scholarship—bless them!—There’s very little money over to educate the girls. Their time is coming when they are grown-up. By then, I hope, some of the boys will be out in the world, and I shall have lots of pennies to spare for pretty frocks for them.”

  “But, Mrs. Churston!” Miss Crosby exclaimed, then stopped. The futility of saying anything more swept over her. How hope by mere words to change a point of view so radically at variance with her own? Of what use to say: “Why not educate Judith then, who has the brains, and let the boys do without?”—when Catherine was plainly feeling that it was a waste of time to spend much money educating a pretty girl, when with any luck she’d be married before she was out of her teens. Miss Crosby admitted the rightness of this point of view. Obviously for most girls marriage was the best thing. But surely for the brilliant Judith there should be something else—something more liable to make its mark in the world, than just producing babies year after year. But she said nothing. Only her shoulders drooped. Catherine noticed the droop.

  “I’m sorry, Crossy, dear. I can see you’ve set your heart on this. It does seem hard on you, for you’ve taught Judith wonderfully. David and I do appreciate it. I promise you I’ll talk to him—tell him how strongly you feel. But don’t hope too much.”

  Judith was waiting on the stairs, hugging her tummy to hold back her excitement.

  “Well, Crossy? Well?” Then she too noticed the droop. Her voice sank. “Mummy said no?”

  “Not absolutely. She said she’d talk it over with your father.”

  “Then there is hope?”

  “None, I’m afraid.”

  “Crossy, what shall we do if they say no?”

  “Nothing, my dear. There’s nothing we can do.”

  Catherine waited until she and David were in bed.

  “David, Crossy has been talking to me about Judith. She wants us to send her to a college.”

  Startled, David sat up.

  “A college! Why?”

  “Crossy says she is so clever that she ought to have a chance to make a career for herself.”

  “Miss Crosby is wrong. I feel sure the only career our Judith wishes for is to help you here and me in my parish, and some day, if God should so will it, have a husband, and children, and home of her own to look after.”

  Catherine looked at him in amazement. It seemed to her incredible that anybody could live in the same house as Judith and acquire such a remarkably incorrect vision of her.

  “I don’t think,” she said drily, “you’ll find those are exactly Judith’s views.”

  “Then Judith must learn,” said David sternly. “God intended women to be wives and mothers. Some unfortunate women have to work, but not our girls. I feel very much to blame if the training we have provided for them has given them any other ideas.”

  Catherine reported the gist of this conversation as tactfully as possible to Miss Crosby, who said nothing, but looked crushed. Judith, on hearing the news, was for rebellion.

  “Don’t let’s take this lying down, let’s fight!”

  “How?”

  “I’ll go on hunger strike, like the Suffragettes.”

  But Miss Crosby was firm.

  “If you do, Judith, I shall leave the house. I won’t be a party to children disobeying their parents. Lack of training is an obstacle in life, but no obstacle ever yet prevented a really first-rate person from getting to the top. It should be an incentive to you. We must show your parents what you can do, without their help.”

  She said this, and much more to Judith, but her own thoughts were in quite another strain. Her pupil, her prize pupil, was to be stunted at the start. The one person Fate had thrown out to her, who might in her life have made some mark—a mark which should say to those who cared to look: “Theodora Crosby did not live in vain.” It was useless to feed herself on fairy tales which had obstacles bravely overcome as their theme—she knew how difficult it would be to attain to anything much, when education finished at seventeen and life was full to overflowing with social duties, and work in the parish. Only the strongest spirit could rise above it. Judith’s was not that spirit. The result of this private thinking was a secret bitterness. It seemed to her that Judith was a crying example of the injustice commonly meted out to the entire female sex. This thought festered in her. She longed to do something, to retaliate. The Suffrage Movement, up till then a movement about which she talked, and to which she subscribed, became a movement for which she must act.

  The fact that their beloved Crossy was often absent-minded, and full of much thought, did not pass unnoticed in the schoolroom. They probed. They questioned her.

  “What are you thinking of, Crossy?”

  “A penny for your thoughts.”

  Then at last, one day she told them:

  “My dears, I can’t sit idle any longer, I must strike a blow for freedom.”

  “What sort of a blow?” asked Esther.

  “I’m not sure. I have the day off on Friday. I shall go to London. When there, something will tell me what to do.”

  “Oh, Crossy!” Judith sprang to her feet. “Take me with you. I want to strike a blow for freedom, too.”

  “Can’t we all go and strike blows?” said Susanna, who was in favour of a day in London on any pretext.

  “No, my dears. You know you wouldn’t be allowed to.”

  “Oh, it is mean,” Judith complained. “I’d love to do something desperate.”

  “What, shoot somebody, do you mean?” Susanna queried.

  “Even that!” replied Judith dramatically, “if I thought it my duty. Look at Charlotte Corday.”

  “That wasn’t shooting,” Esther objected. “That was in a bath. I should think it’s very difficult to get at people in their baths.”

  “I shall throw a stone for freedom,” Miss Crosby murmured ecstatically.

  “What, really a stone?” asked Esther.

  “Oh, Crossy! If you are going to throw a stone through a shop window, may I give you the stone for you to throw?” In her excitement Judith hopped from foot to foot.

  “But if,” Susanna argued, “it’s only throwing a stone through a shop window you are going to do, why go to London? Why don’t we all walk down to the village and throw it through Mrs. Honeysett’s?”

  “We couldn’t do that,” Judith objected. “Mrs. Honeysett would only think it was an accident, for she’s so deaf, and she never reads. I don’t suppose she’s ever heard of the Suffragettes.”

  Miss Crosby felt vaguely that the conversation was leaving its high plane and touching the ridiculous, so she sent the girls to dress for their walk.

  Friday morning was cold and blowy. The three girls and Miss Crosby gathered in the kitchen garden before breakfast. Their noses looked blue.

  “Here it is,” said Judith. She produced a large flint. Miss Crosby opened her handbag to receive it. But Judith passionately held it to her lips. “To freedom!” she whispered as she kissed it.

  Esther, feeling it was expected of her, but conscious of looking a fool, took the stone from Judith, and in a hangdog way gave it a peck, then held it out to Susanna. But Susanna refused to see it. She gazed stubbornly back at the house, pretending not to know what was going on.

  “I just couldn’t,” she said to Esther afterwards. “I know I would have laughed out loud.”

  Esther, left holding the flint, dropped it hurriedly and furtively into the eager mouth of Miss Crosby
’s black bag.

  “Let’s sing something,” Judith urged. “A battle song.”

  Her sisters were, however, spared this ordeal by the opportune ringing of the gong for breakfast.

  That evening, in great excitement, the girls went to the station to welcome their Amazon home. But when the train arrived, there was no Miss Crosby. It was the last train that day. Anxious and disconsolate, they wandered back to the Vicarage. After dinner Catherine came to Judith.

  “Do you know where Crossy was going today?”

  Judith was torn between loyalty and anxiety.

  “I do know, Mummy, but I’m not sure she’d like me to tell you.”

  “Do you know if she meant to get back tonight?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Then I think you had better tell me. Something may have happened to her. You can trust me.”

  Thankfully Judith poured out her story. Her mother looked at her in dismay.

  “Oh, darling! Poor blessed Crossy! Such an expedition, in such a spirit. She’s probably in prison by now.”

  “What can we do, Mummy?”

  “You can’t do anything. But I shall go to London the first thing tomorrow, and try and find out what’s happened to her. And I’m afraid in the meantime we must tell Daddy a sort of story. If he asks where she is, say I’ve let her go away for a bit. But I daresay he’ll never notice she isn’t here.”

  Catherine found it difficult to trace Miss Crosby. But by dint of pulling many influential strings, she ran her to ground in Holloway Gaol. She had given a false name and address for the sake of her employers. She was serving a sentence of a month in the second division, having scornfully refused the alternative of a fine. It took Catherine several days, and most elaborate and immoral wire-pulling, before she got permission to see her.

  She took a taxi to the prison, and felt positively medieval as she drove up to its barred, turreted entrance. A cold shiver ran down her spine as the porter locked the first gate behind her, and she stood humbly in the door of the porter’s lodge, in a cage as it were, with the further gate locked before her. When, with a jingling of keys, a wardress arrived to admit her, her eyes filled with tears. “Such a lot of locking and barring,” she thought, “to guard poor heroic, little Crossy.” The wardress handed her to another wardress, who led her to a tiny room and seated her facing a wire window. Presently there was the sound of the shuffling of smallish feet in enormous, heavy shoes, and Miss Crosby appeared at the far side of the wire window. Such a changed Miss Crosby. She was wearing a dark green, badly-fitting dress covered with broad arrows, gaping sadly in front over her meagre chest. A little white cap was tied rakishly on one side of her head, from which had escaped a few strands of her reddish-grey hair which hung drearily across her forehead. To Catherine, who had never seen her in anything but a crisp high-collared shirt-blouse and a full serviceable skirt—for to suit season and occasion she only varied material and colour, never line—her appearance was a shock. But it was not the degrading effect of the prison clothes which appalled her, but the change in Miss Crosby herself. She looked ghastly. Catherine tried desperately to think of an opening remark. But pity got the better of her, her eyes filled with tears. Miss Crosby didn’t notice the tears. She began at once with eager emphasis.

  “Oh, dear Mrs. Churston, it is good of you to have come to see me. I’m afraid both you and the Vicar must be very angry with me, but—well, there it is—it just had to be—I couldn’t go on letting other women fight my battles for me. Suffer for me.”

  “Suffer!” Catherine looked at Miss Crosby’s incredibly yellow skin. “Crossy dear, you aren’t doing a hunger strike, are you?”

  A horrible change crept into Miss Crosby’s face. Terror peeped out of her eyes. Beads of perspiration sprang up on her forehead. She licked her lips. She seemed to have difficulty in swallowing. Then she nodded.

  “Of course I am. We all do. It’s the only way.”

  “Are they feeding you by force?”

  A slight, almost imperceptible shiver passed over Miss Crosby—but she replied with a painfully forced jauntiness.

  “If you don’t mind, we won’t talk about it—I make it a rule not to think about it in between—it’s time enough when I hear them coming—” For all her efforts, her voice had a frightened quiver on the last word.

  “Oh, Crossy, dear,” Catherine murmured.

  Miss Crosby made a quick nervous movement.

  “Please! Please! Don’t sympathise. I don’t need it. I am proud and glad to be where I am.”

  “What are you going to do when you get out?”

  “Why, come back to you! Oh, I may come back to you, mayn’t I? You won’t get rid of me for this?” She sounded slightly hysterical, very unlike the Miss Crosby of ordinary times.

  Catherine leaned forward. She spoke slowly and gently.

  “Listen, Crossy dear. While you are in here you’ll have a lot of time to think, and I want you to make up your mind what is due to the Suffragette Cause and what is due to us. If you feel you must give up your life to the cause of the Suffragettes, I shan’t argue with you. We shall hate to lose you, but you must live by your own conscience. If, on the other hand, you feel my girls are the more important, I shall know if you come back I have your promise not to break the law again. It’s obvious, isn’t it, that we can’t have a governess who is always popping in and out of prison?”

  Miss Crosby listened to this in silence, tears of weakness trickling down her nose, and dripping dismally on to her folded hands. Almost immediately there was a jingling of keys, and a wardress appeared and led her away.

  They were all at the Castle for Easter, when they received a telegram:

  “Expect me 12.30 tomorrow. Crosby.”

  Catherine had succeeded in keeping her governess’s whereabouts a secret from her father-in-law and his household, but not from David or the children. David had been horrified.

  “But, Catherine, you are not suggesting having her back? We can’t have a woman like that influencing our children.”

  “A woman like what?”

  “Well!—a noisy, window-smashing woman. A woman who has been in prison. I try my best never to interfere in household matters, which are, of course, entirely your province. But I must refuse to have Miss Crosby back. I’m sorry, for I always liked her, always thought her such a good woman.”

  Catherine saw red.

  “And isn’t she still a good woman? Can’t you still like her in spite of the fact that she’s willing to fight for her faith? What would you do, David, if all the clergy were refused the vote on the ground that their opinion was of no value to the country? Wouldn’t you fight?”

  David looked anxious.

  “Oh, my dear, you haven’t got bitten with this wretched Women’s Suffrage nonsense, have you?”

  Catherine laughed.

  “Me! Good gracious, no! I’m only trying to make you look at the thing fairly. I want justice for poor Crossy, and she ought to get it from you more than from most people, for you would have so enjoyed earning the martyr’s crown if you’d lived at the right date.”

  “My dear, don’t think I don’t understand. I do. I realise the poor woman was only doing what she thought right, however misguided she may have been. But you must see that it’s impossible we should have her back. It would be blue murder! Why, she might try teaching her views to the girls! A woman above all else should be womanly. These screaming, stone-throwing harridans bring shame on your entire sex.”

  “Oh, David, darling, don’t be so narrow-minded. You know as well as I do that Crossy isn’t like that. I wish you could have seen her as I saw her. Shut up in that dreadful place, shuffling along, yellow and bent, and frightened, in the most appalling clothes. And yet, awful as it all was, she was glad to be there in a way, glad of the chance to do her share. You think the Suffragettes are dreadful. I’
ve always thought them funny. The spirit that’s in them isn’t, either. I suppose martyrdom for a cause, whatever one may privately think of the cause, is always a thing one can only bow one’s head before and marvel at. It’s magnificent.”

  David was impressed at her sincerity.

  “I do hope I’m not being narrow. I can’t agree offhand to allow this woman to come back. It’s a matter which needs much thought and prayer. But allow her to join us for a day or so when she leaves prison, and I will have a talk to her—I can’t promise more.”

  Miss Crosby’s train was late. They were all at luncheon. The days of the merry meals in Mrs. Pliss’s room were over, and now they all fed in grandeur and discomfort in the dining-room. Miss Crosby nervously scuttled in, shook hands all round, and sank into her chair under Lord Bristone’s baleful eye, for he hated people who arrived late for meals, and governesses at any time. He eyed her over his glasses.

  “Where have you been? Where have you been?”

  “Away,” Miss Crosby faltered, feeling the children’s and Catherine’s anxious eyes on her.

  “It doesn’t seem to have agreed with you, if I may say so.”

  “No,” Miss Crosby replied faintly, nervously twisting and untwisting her hands.

  Catherine hurried into the conversation.

  “The daffodils are better than ever this year, Father.”

  Lord Bristone wouldn’t be drawn.

  “What’s she been up to?” he asked, jerking his head at the miserable Miss Crosby. “Looks half dead.”

  “Now, Father, don’t be so personal. Miss Crosby’s been working too hard, that’s all.”

  This was too much for the gravity of Manasses and Maccabeus. For some time they had been on the verge of nervous giggles; at this last delicate reference to hard labour, they broke into peals of laughter. With roars of rage their grandfather ordered them from the room. But they had the desired effect. Lord Bristone’s interest was diverted from Miss Crosby to his grandsons. For the rest of luncheon the conversation was a long growling monologue on ill-brought-up children. As they rose from the table, Esdras mis-quoted into Miss Crosby’s ear: