CHAPTER III
"French is to be talked from the time the rising-bell rings in the morning to the time the dressing-bell rings for supper at night."
So ran Rule 9, at St. Dorothea's Home School for Girls. It was relaxed on Saturdays at twelve after the hour in the gymnasium.
At ten minutes to twelve the gloomy cavern, known as the Glory Hole, rang with noise which, according to the ancient series of L. T. Meade's school-stories, stocking the library, should have been punctuated with "silvery ripples of girlish laughter." It wasn't. The parrot-house at the Zoo would have been nearer the mark. A harassed prefect presided, noting the names of people who insisted on forestalling the cuckoo-clock.
"Parlez-vous Français, Margery, ou je dirai Mademoiselle."
"Ma foi! N'est-ce pas que c'est douze heures?"
"Le cuckoo a cuckooé, je suis positive."
"Doris, vous sotte-ane, c'est ma place que vous prendre."
Moods and tenses were blandly ignored at St. Dorothea's outside the actual French class.
"Naw," denied Doris, resolutely blocking the partition wherein she had thrust her own gym shoes. "Je partage cet morceau de le shelf avec Ferlie."
"Mais, avant Ferlie, j'ai avez baggé!"
This last effort could not pass muster even on a Saturday.
"Margery, 'bag' n'est pas Français et c'est argot. Prenez un point de conversation."
"Mais si je fait cela je ne peut pas jouez hockey. Soyez une sport, Mary."
There was an understanding that whosoever lost six marks during the week for failing to observe Rule 9 was relegated to the ranks of the crocodile, with the junior class of all, after lunch, instead of being permitted to join in the usual Saturday games.
Margery was a constant offender; and the Fourth Form A. were to play the Fourth Form B.!
"Si vous ne jouerez pas, ce sera un tiroir," prophesied Ferlie ingeniously, after pausing an instant to consider the French for a "draw" at hockey.
The clock whirred. "Cuckoo! Cuckoo!"
"Thank God!" said Margery Craven, piously.
The prefect fled, pretending not to hear.
"I thought you weren't playing either, Ferlie?"
"I am not—that's why I said if you can't play centre-forward in my place the A's will be about level with the B's. You and I combined give the A's the advantage."
"Why isn't Ferlie playing?" asked Doris Martell.
"Don't you know?" and Margery's air was fraught with mystery. "The co-rrespondent from Far Cathay has asked—and obtained—permission to take the Favourite of the Upper Fourth to the Zoo."
"Lucky little beast!"
"How long is he going to stop in England, Ferlie?"
"Only six months this time. Father and Mum never take such short leave, but Cyprian has had malaria..."
"It's a beautiful name," mused Doris with upturned eyes. "No wonder she blushes!"
"Silly ass!"
"What beats me," said Margery, "is how Martha and Mary allow Ferlie to gad about with a genuine trousered male in an expensive tailored suit and all the appurtenances thereof. Because even if he does look forty he's not really your uncle, is he, Ferlie?"
"No, thank the Lord! I shouldn't feel nearly so comfy with him if he were."
"She confesses to feeling comfy with him," Margery informed the others. "Brazen hussy! And she a 'Sunlight Fairy'!"
Ferlie forgot Cyprian in a sudden righteous indignation. "You shut it, Margery! Lot of grinning shriekers! Thought yourselves very funny, didn't you? You wouldn't laugh if it were your mess."
For Ferlie's instinctive courtesy, rooted in a horror of hurting people's feelings and combined with a certain dreamy trustfulness in human nature, characteristic of her, had landed her in a false position which, during the past week, had been the joke of the school.
A dean's wife, far-famed for excellent work among the business girls of the suburbs, and convinced that the road to salvation for all budding womanhood lay via the fold of a Purity Society organized by her, had now conceived the idea of interesting the girls' schools in a campaign of mutual prayer and interchange of friendly letters with these unknown female correspondents of the working-class, all virgin pilgrims up the Hill of Difficulty, pledged not to permit male travellers to carry their bundles nor waste their time in frivolous communications. The Misses Mayne, generally known to their pupils, in terms of disrespectful affection, as "Martha" and "Mary," approved of the plan and accorded the dean's wife half an hour one Sunday afternoon, following Bible Class, to set forth her appeal for supporters in the school.
At the close of an earnest address she had suggested that any of them willing to join the League and correspond with another young woman, forlornly in search of true friendship, would hold up a hand.
Ferlie, having arrived late from an imperfectly learnt collect, happened to be sitting at a front desk, eschewed by early arrivals as too nearly under the eye of Martha for perfect ease. Not having paid particular attention to the proceedings, but gleaning from the speaker's tense expression that something was expected of the school—possibly a penny a week to the Blind Babies' Fund—she mechanically raised her hand, wondering the while whether there would be time after the Zoo to take Cyprian to that new tea-shop where you could always get hot dough-nuts, fresh and jammy. Hers was the only hand raised. The role of "Sunlight Fairy," by letter, to a factory girl did not appeal to the Margeries and Dorises of the Upper Fourth, and the senior school members were struggling with finishing exams and wanted no extra correspondence thrust upon them in their scant leisure. Had she only known it, the dean's wife was about the fourth of a series of well-meaning women that term obsessed with schemes for benefiting England's blossoming womanhood. To put it coarsely, St. Dorothea's had "had some."
Margery was the most interested in Ferlie's future radiance as a "Fairy." The dean's wife, impressed by such single-minded strength of character, had invited her to tea and presented her with a blue card depicting a rising sun shooting an inquisitive searchlight on the face of a worried-looking young woman wending her way up a crowded thoroughfare either in quest of true friendship or a factory.
"And it's quite time you began," said Margery severely, at the termination of Ferlie's bitter harangue.
The bell for the reading of the week's marks interrupted them; following which rite a strong smell of Irish stew combined with apple pudding, in the hall, did duty for a lunch menu.
And, "I will not eat the bottom bit of my suet to-day," Margery resolved in a fierce whisper as they filed to their seats.
The conversation over the gravied onions made about four times the volume of sound as on a French day.
The Misses Mayne, one at each end of the long table, beamed indulgently. "Martha," the practical one, who was also the junior of the two sisters, confined her remarks to the state of the hockey field and reminders that stockings were to be changed immediately on the team's return.
"Mary" brightened life at her post by little reminiscences of the ways in which she had spent her Saturdays at school, "when hockey for girls was quite out of the question, my dears," and the Magic Lantern, with views of foreign countries in colours, existed still as a delirious mid-term treat.
All went contentedly until the last helping of apple pudding had been served out, and then Mary settled her glasses and allowed her kindly faded eyes to rest on one particular plate.
"Now, Margery"—a sudden hush followed the raising of the gentle tones—"are you going to conquer that pudding or are you going to let that pudding conquer you?"
The luckless Margery, who had brought an empty paper bag to lunch with felonious intent, started guiltily and reddened to the forehead.
"You know it is by overcoming—always by overcoming—the weaknesses in ourselves that we develop into worth-while members of the world's community," Mary continued.
"Or by coming it over other people," muttered Ferlie, sympathizing with Margery's sensations towards the grey mound of suet pushed to one side of her plate.
"It—it always makes me feel sick, Miss Mayne," faltered Margery hysterically.
"Imagination!" came from Martha's end of the table. "How can good wholesome food make anyone feel sick?"
Margery's mouth took an obstinate curve. She was not going to be intimidated by Martha, anyhow.
That lady, with twenty years' experience of Margeries behind her, probably sensed rebellion and decided the moment had arrived for brisk disciplinary methods.
"Eat it up, Margery, and don't be foolish," she said.
Margery sat very still.
The rest of the table did not want to witness her downfall, nor seem, by respectful silence, to approve the idiosyncrasies of Martha and Mary. Why should anyone eat the beastly pudding who did not want to? The fees were paid just the same.
Strained low-toned comments on the progress of the new tennis court began to be heard; but Mary was wiser than Martha, as of old. Far wiser. Long and humble study of the New Testament had inclined her heart to keep its Law. She ruled, in fact, by love.
"I think we'll leave it to Margery's own Brave Self," she told her sister. "She understands that it is for her own good, mentally and physically, that we desire her to eat it. Do not distress yourself, my child. Just think the matter over carefully and then decide which of your two natures is to Win the Fray. If, to-day, you decide to leave it..."
She smiled watery encouragement at Margery, by this time incapable of eating anything. Lunch finished a little hurriedly.
Said Martha that night in the private sitting-room, where she and Mary were wont to dissect characters and debate the handling of them:
"A little giddy."
"But warm-hearted," defended Mary.
"Shallow," said Martha.
"It is a question of guidance, Sister," insisted Mary.
Martha remained unconverted.
"Obstinacy must be dealt with firmly," she said. "You will be at a loss next Saturday over the apple pudding."
Came a knock at the door, and Margery stood beside the tinted reproduction of the Good Shepherd near it, looking at Mary over the stand crammed with photos of dear departed pupils who, with Youth's heartlessness, had supplied her, since, with no other memories of their passing.
"I've decided to c-conquer the p-pudding," announced Margery. And felt almost rewarded by the spiritual ecstasy of affection in Mary's little eyes.
* * * * * *
Cyprian did not recognize the sisters for the last of a long line of sanctified Englishwomen who, in the past, have run Happy Home-Schools for the daughters of unmodern mothers, many of whom lived abroad and who cherished the suspicion that dear Daphne or Nora would not be prevented from over-working to the detriment of her health at a modern establishment which dealt in Oxford examiners rather than in embroidery classes.
It was Ferlie who grew critical of the Miss Maynes's curriculum, with the conclusion of her fourteenth birthday, and so of their blatant efforts to coerce in the straight and narrow way.
To Cyprian, the sisterless bookworm, the ladies recalled his deceased aunts, a couple who belonged, by rights, to a Victorian novel and at whose separate funerals a special hearse had to be requisitioned for the wreaths.
And all the flowers were symbolically white.
Ferlie, the out-reaching experimentalist, wondered whether such of Cyprian's aunts as remained above ground were exactly the type of people to direct the electrical currents in a houseful of twentieth century youth.
"Mary could have whistled for my brave and better nature," she told Cyprian this afternoon, in relating the incident of the pudding, with a resentment he considered entirely out of proportion to the fact that she had not minded the suet herself. He admitted that, as a sane man, he never ate things which he did not like, nor did he know anybody who, having attained years of discretion, believed such a course necessary to salvation.
"But, you see, it must be difficult, Ferlie, to legislate for so many tastes and, despite certain things of which you may disapprove, the Misses Mayne seem kind to you all."
"I think I could do with less kindness and more common sense," she persisted, "and far less prayer!"
He looked at the eager profile, bordered by a riot of autumn-tinted curls, and wondered, a little anxiously, whether Ferlie was growing up a sceptic like her father. And himself. And most of his friends.
He would rather she took both Testaments at a gulp like a pill, in the unquestioning faith that they would purge her as with hyssop according to promise.
He recognized his attitude to be decidedly illogical. Perhaps the simplicity of Mrs. Carmichael was not quite such a matter for humorous reflection, after all. Supposing the Woman-of-the-Future, no longer sheltered from the rough and tumble of things, began universally to don the materialistic armour suited to her defence, and ceased to set her marching song to the awe-inspiring chant:
"We love Thine altar, Lord;
Oh, what on earth so dear?
For there in faith adored,
We find Thy presence near!"
The singers might possess the undeveloped minds of little children. They might. Nevertheless...
"They are such good women, Ferlie."
"I don't consider them any better members of the world's community than you," Ferlie informed him carelessly, adding, "and they have, according to their ideas, much more to gain by being good."
Cyprian did not quite know what to answer. A less humble man might have suspected that he was fast becoming the child's ideal. He only knew that they cared a great deal for one another and that Life, for him, seemed less meaningless, though more unreal, when they were together.
He had chosen the Zoo because it was the nearest open-air entertainment within reach, by tram, of the suburb which contained St. Dorothea's, and Ferlie was not, under Rule 6, allowed to attend indoor places of amusement in term-time. And surely, at fourteen, it was a reasonable spot to take Ferlie, the animal-lover, for recreation.
"But the tea here is beastly," she stated candidly, and he undertook to follow where she should lead when the hour for nourishment approached.
There were long stretches of walking between the enclosures of the Big and Bloodthirsty caged inhabitants which Ferlie favoured. The two strolled along contentedly, exchanging current news.
Presently: "You know she's abroad, Cyprian?"
"Really!"
"You didn't try to find out?"
"Not this time, Ferlie. What's the use?"
Ferlie was frowning.
"Aunt Brillianna asked me for a visit at Christmas. And I went. I like her. She doesn't talk rot to me just because I am not grown up. She goes on like you do. And one wet afternoon another woman came in and said that the Vane girl had gone abroad after a nervous break-down, and Aunt B. said, 'Oh, that's what they've decided to call it? The uttermost ends of the earth would not effect a cure.' And I am telling you, Cyprian, because I feel that if it means that she has been ill, you would rather know."
"Thanks, old lady."
"But, Cyprian——"
"Dear!"
"I can't be a hypocrite about it. I don't really hope it is as bad as smallpox, but if anything does make me hope that Martha and Mary's Day of Judgment is true in every detail, it's her."
"But why, Ferlie?"
"If she came back would you ask her again now?" she asked, ignoring explanation.
He revolved the possibility in his mind, seeking, as ever with her, the meticulously accurate answer her candid eyes deserved.
"I hardly know. I have never met another woman whom I wanted—that way. But then, in my life out East, I see very few Englishwomen, and they are generally married. I have guarded the thought of her, as the Perfect One for me, so long in my heart that, sometimes, I doubt whether any woman could be all that one imagines her when one—cares. It is not fair to endow your Ideal with the qualities which suit you and then blame her for not acting always according to your conceptions."
She walked on silently for some way with bent head and her cheeks unusually flushed. Then she spoke again, rapidly.
"I have got to tell you, Cyprian. From what I have heard, now and again, I think that if you did ask now, you—you'd get the answer you wanted once. There aren't a lot of men like there used to be, and—and I don't understand what it is all about but there is Something.... Well, anyway, you'd stand a good chance now. So I've got to tell you."
"You don't want me to take that chance, Ferlie?"
She turned her face from him, unanswering. And Cyprian incomprehensibly knew that he would never seek out Muriel Vane with that question on his lips; that her image would slowly drift out of his dreams and that before it receded for ever he could make no effort to call it back. Could not? Then it was true that no man worshipped only at one shrine in a lifetime? It was the Ideal and not the Individual to which he burnt his incense! The most startling part of this discovery was that nothing mattered at the moment save that Ferlie would be glad of it.
"As the years go by, one must change," he said diffidently.
She drew a long breath and spoke nonchalantly lest it should be interpreted as relief.
"She must be quite an old woman by now. At least twenty-six or twenty-seven."
Cyprian's laughter shattered the imperceptible barrier of restraint.
"How old do you think I am, Ferlie?"
She surveyed him critically. "Well, you are never any particular age to me because, underneath, I feel you are about mine; but the other girls don't think you look more than forty."
"They are a little premature. I am only thirty-five."
"It's a good age, you know," said Ferlie gravely. "How terribly short Life is; over before you have got anywhere."
"You think I have wasted mine, up to date?"
"It all depends on what you want in the end. Do you know I have a feeling sometimes that we are all just as much in cages as these animals, and can't get out without breaking something. The cages Chance dropped us into when we were born. Think how enormous and how interesting the earth is! And how much of it shall you and I ever see unless we break away from the particular bits we are imprisoned in? Just look at that old lion. He has settled down, quite pleased, forgetting that there was a time when he, or his ancestors, walked where they wished for miles in the jungle. And a lot of us copy him. Satisfied in captivity because it is comfortable. We don't remember what it was like in the days of our freedom but common-sense tells us it was unsheltered and unsure. My ancestors may have been gipsies and, if I had the courage, I might be one again by breaking things. Ordinarily, Martha and Mary have got me till I am seventeen; then it will be some finishing place in France for a year, and then Mother comes home and I shall be considered luckier than most girls in squeezing a Season or so out of Burma before Dad retires."
"During which you will marry, Ferlie, and settle down like a well-behaved little lioness and..."
"Live Mother's life all over again for her—ugh!"
She stared at the lion.
"No I shan't. It can stay there if it likes, and all the other fool-animals who don't know their own strength. I've got some inkling of mine. I am going to get out of the cage."
A passing keeper warned her not to shake the bars and not to go so near, Miss.
She ignored him, clinging fervently to her subject.
"That old elephant could turn the howdah off his back, kill at least twenty people and overset the monkey-house inside quarter of an hour. And, instead, he just walks stupidly up and down, up and down."
"Please don't put ideas into his head in passing," begged Cyprian.
"Well, he's only an animal and so would misuse his regained power. But a man needn't," said Ferlie, hot-footed on the trail of great discoveries, "a man needn't... Are you happy, Cyprian?"
"I—I've hardly thought about it."
"You ought to have thought about it. You have been thirty-five years in a world where there is unlimited happiness and unlimited misery. And you haven't yet decided which you want to choose: Spring days, and stars, and the smell of the sea, and flowers, and experiments in queer forces electrifying every creature that lives and breathes, or somnambulisticism ... listen, I made that word up, I think—in a stuffy old cage, the bars of which are conventions which ought to be broken into smither——"
"Ferlie, you are making that lion angry by beating the umbrella on his bars."
"He can have it if he wants it," she said, hurling it into the cage. "Martha made me bring it because she knows I hate carrying one. Said you always knew a gentlewoman by the make of her umbrella. I should think that anyone having to carry a special sort of umbrella to prove her gentility must be——"
"Good Lord!" exclaimed Cyprian as the lion crunched through silk and spokes, roaring insults at Ferlie the while, "Do come away. The keeper is on his way back here and everybody is looking at us."
Everybody is looking at us! That last truth would have vexed him more but for the tolerant amusement on the face of a lady standing near them. She seemed past middle age and indifferent to the fact, being practically and severely costumed in dark grey, while her iron-grey hair fitted so tidily into her toque that one immediately divined it was shingled. She fixed Cyprian with a placid eye.
"The unfortunate lion," she said, "breaking his teeth, like the rest of us, on an illusion flung like a challenge at his head by Youth in rebellion!"
Cyprian lifted his hat awkwardly in acknowledgment of the remark, inwardly deciding, a little acidly, that she might have realized he was, possibly, as near Ferlie's age as hers. But Ferlie, herself, twisted about with a rapturous greeting.
"Why, it's Aunt Brillianna!"
Aunt Brillianna accompanied them to the tea-shop, picking up the thread of Ferlie's discourse just where the end had blown loose.
"And when you have got out of your cage, Ferlie, and are no more mentioned by the long-suffering Misses Mayne, except in secret and grieving prayer, and when you have trodden on your mother's heart and taken unholy satisfaction in the fascinatingly soft squelch of it, and when you have seen the iron enter into your unbelieving father's soul on your flat refusal to mate with the most promising and dyspeptically desk-chained member of his service, and when you have laid the foundations for a new Utopia where everyone will find himself uncaged and free and—if I mistake not—naked, will there really be enough blue-birds in the trees to go round?"
"You are only pretending to laugh at me, Aunt B.; you know quite well what I want."
"Six eclairs, four dough-nuts, two cream-buns, a strawberry-ice and a dose of castor oil," Aunt Brillianna promptly informed the attendant in lace cap and apron: adding with a scrutinizing glance at her white face, "you look as if you could do with that list and some over, yourself, my dear child."
The tea-girl blushed and, reading sincerity in the friendly smile, admitted that she had had a particularly long day owing to Them being shorthanded.
"Never mind," encouraged Aunt B., "I'll stand you treat with this niece of mine, provided the moment you get off duty you settle down to it at any place where the cakes are not so well-known to you as these."
Cyprian protested at her making herself responsible for their own three teas.
"Don't be silly," she advised him, "I am quite old enough to make a nephew of you if I wish. Ferlie is my great-niece and it is quite useless to try and hide the ghastly fact. And I have quite a lot of money scattered about in odd corners of the earth. Some day Ferlie shall have some to build a Temple to her Freedom goddess or god. She will find, sooner or later, that the bars she objects to are made of gold. You ought to know that. How are rubies?"
"Ferlie has told you what I do?"
"Ferlie has told me much more of all you have left undone. Quite unintentionally she has painted a portrait of you in your true colours. I doubt if you could paint her—or any woman—in hers."
"I hope the picture did not impress you altogether unfavourably?"
"We are discarding the fallacy nowadays that Love is blind," said Aunt B. inconsequently. "While young and clear-eyed it has excellent sight. Later, it takes to dark-glasses of its own choice, and so gives an impression of sightlessness. Ferlie knows you better now than she ever will know you, Edward ... or, no, that's not the name—What is it, Ferlie?"
"It's 'Cyprian,'" announced Ferlie from a bath of cream and jam, "and you're frightening him to death, Aunt B."
"Can't help that. He's rather embarrassing me by being so palpably embarrassed. Don't blink like that, Cyprian. Are you young enough to join Ferlie in those poisonous cakes or would you prefer a scone?"
Cyprian coldly selected an éclair.
"Happy man!" said Aunt B., twinkling all over, "The sweets of life are tasteless against my false teeth. A watercress sandwich, now..."
She was a startling contrast to Cyprian's late-lamented aunts, influencing the life of Little Puddington, even under their heavy slabs of marble, by the trail of Guilds, Club-rooms, and Organ endowments left behind them. And Martha and Mary would have said, with one accord, that a woman's glory was her hair. A wig, or at least, a discreet frame, if not an actual transformation, would be preferable to that shameless modern shingling.
Brillianna Trefusis was too obviously one of those new elderly women who no longer found the Presence on the altar of wood and stone, and as obviously was Ferlie in love with her.
She caused Cyprian to leap finally in his chair at this stage of his conclusions. Intercepting his interrogative glance at Ferlie, exceeding the Safety First limit as to ice-cream, "You'll like me when you come to know me better," Aunt B. assured him.