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Miss Jenny left “The Standard” with Miriam after tea, stopping suddenly as she made her uncertain way from the tea-table to the door and saying absently, “Eh, you’d better read this, my dear. There’s a leader on the Education Commission. Would ye like to? Yes, I think you’d better.” Miriam accepted the large sheets with hesitating expressions of thanks, wondering rather fearfully what a leader might be and where she should find it. She knew the word. Her mother read “the leaders” in the evening—“excellent leader” she sometimes said, and her father would put down his volume of “Proceedings of the British Association,” or Herbert Spencer’s “First Principles,” and condescendingly agree. But any discussion generally ended in his warning her not to believe a thing because she saw it in print, and a reminder that before she married she had thought that everything she saw in print was true, and quite often he would go on to general remarks about the gullibility of women, bringing in the story of the two large long-necked pearly transparent drawing-room vases with stems and soft masses of roses and leaves painted on their sides that she had given too much for at the door to a man who said they were Italian. Brummagem, Brummagem, he would end, mouthing the word and turning back to his book with the neighing laugh that made Miriam turn to the imagined picture of her mother in the first year of her married life, standing in the sunlight at the back door of the Babington house, with the varnished coach-house door on her right and the cucumber frames in front of her sloping up towards the bean-rows that began the kitchen garden; with her little scallopped bodice, her hooped skirt, her hair bunched in curls up on her high pad and falling round her neck, looking at the jugs with grave dark eyes. And that neighing laugh had come again and again all through the years until she sat meekly, flushed and suffering under the fierce gaslight, feeling every night of her life winter and summer as if the ceiling were coming down on her head, and read “leaders” cautiously, and knew when they were written in “a fine chaste dignified style.” But that was “The Times.” “The Standard” was a penny rag and probably not worth considering at all. In any case she would not read it at evening study. She had never had a newspaper in her hand before as far as she could remember. The girls would see that she did not know how to read it, and it would be snubby towards them to sit there as if she were a Miss Perne, scrumpling a great paper while they sat with their books. So she read her text-books, a page of Saxon Kings with a ten-line summary of each reign, a list of six English counties with their capitals and the rivers the capitals stood on and the principal industries of each town, devising ways of remembering the lists and went on to “Bell’s Standard Elocutionist.” She had found the book amongst the school books on the schoolroom shelves. It was a “standard” book and must therefore be about something she ought to know something about if she were to hold her own in this North London world. There had been no “standard” books at school and the word offended her. It suggested fixed agreement about the things people ought to know and that she felt sure must be wrong, and not only wrong but “common” ... standard readers ... standard pianoforte tutors. She had learned to read in “Reading without Tears,” and gone on to “Classical Poems and Prose for the Young,” her arithmetic book instead of being a thin cold paper-covered thing called Standard I, had been a pleasant green volume called “Barnard Smith,” that began at the beginning and went on to compound fractions and stocks. There was no Morris’s Grammar at Banbury Park, no Wetherell or English Accidence, no bits from “Piers Plowman” and pages of scraps of words with the way they changed in different languages and quotations, just sentences that had made her long for more ... “up-clomb” ... “the mist up-clomb.” She opened “Bell’s Standard Elocutionist” apprehensively, her mind working on possible meanings for elocutionist. She thought of ventriloquist and wondered dismally whether it was a book of conjuring tricks. It was poems, poems and prose, all mixed up together anyhow. The room was very still, the girls all sitting reading with their backs to the table so that nobody “poked.” She could not go on vaguely fluttering pages, so she read a solid-looking poem that was not divided up into verses.
“Robert of Sicily, brother of Pope Urbane And Valmond Emperor of Allemaine, Apparelled in magnificent attire, With retinue of many a knight and squire, On St. John’s eve, at vespers, proudly sat And heard the priests chant the Magnificat.” Should she go on? It was like the pieces in Scott’s novels, the best bits, before the characters began to talk.
... “and bay the moon than such a Roman and bay the moon than such a Roman,” muttered Nancie rapidly, swinging her feet. It would not be fair to read a thing that would take her right away and not teach her anything whilst the girls were learning their things for Monday. She hesitated and turned a page. The poem, she saw, soon began to break up into sentences with quotation signs; somebody making a to-do. Turning several pages at once, she caught sight of the word Hanover. “Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick, by famous Hanover city.” That was irresistible. But she must read it one day away from the gassy room and the pressure of the girls. The lines were magic; but the rush that took her to the German town, the sight and smell and sound of it, the pointed houses, wood fires, the bürgers, had made her cheeks flare and thrown her out of the proper teacher’s frame of mind. She wanted to stand up and pull up the blinds hiding the garden and shout the poem aloud to the girls. They would stare and giggle and think she had gone mad. “The mountain has gone mad,” Nancie would mutter. “There is a mountain in Banbury Park, covered over with yellow bark,” Nancie’s description of herself. That was how the girls saw her stiff hair—and they thought she was “about forty.” Well, it was true. She was, practically. She went on holding Bell up before her face, open at a page of prose, and stared at the keyboard of the piano just beyond her crossed knees. It aroused the sight and sense of the strangely moving hands of the various girls whose afternoon practice it was her business to superintend, their intent faces, the pages of bad unclassical music, things with horrible names, by English composers, the uselessness of the hours and terms and years of practice.