First of all, I was received as a full member of the Lawn confraternity. Aunt Jael allowed me to go out and play: ay, with this selfsame famous tribe through whose frankness in grappling with fundamentals I had been disgraced and sent away.
"No filth, mind! No low talk. No abominations."
Nor were there. Filth, low talk and abominations had departed with Joseph Jones to his draper's apprenticeship in a big city—this was one of the large events of my absence—and what Bristol gained, Tawborough lost. Under the new rule of Laurie Prideaux I heard no more of the talk to which my six weeks under Joe had been accustoming me. The change of chieftainship meant a change in the tone of the whole community. Joe bullied and sneered if you wouldn't use his words; Laurie thrashed Ted King for using them. One boy changed the moral outlook of a Lawn; a generation, a town, a world! Under Laurie's patronage I was received into full membership. Under which flag? After a moving discussion, in which arguments charged with the nicest theological insight jostled with mere vulgar prejudice against my clothes (this was the Tompkins girl, over-dressed and under-witted little cat that she was), it was decided that the Chapel League was best fitted to receive me to its nonconformist bosom. I could not help feeling it a come-down that a Saint should be classed, as it were officially, with mere Dissenters: it was, however, the lesser of two evils, for the Church of England, after all, was something worse than "mere."
I was never much good at the various games, tig, French cricket, rounders and the like, which occupied so large a part of Lawn life. The amorous ones—Kiss in the Ring and Shy Widow—I shunned altogether. I was too serious, or too sensitive, or high-minded, or morbid, to be able to regard touch as a plaything sentiment. Laurie and Marcus were nice boys, and I liked them, quite definitely; but I refused to respond when they "chose" me for their lady. In these games of sentiment and shy surrender, the challenge of choice must be accepted without flush or murmur: I could not, so refused to take part. Kissing was too precious a privilege. I cherished it for three people only: my Mother when I sought the gates of Heaven; myself when on my own lips in the looking-glass I tried to discover the mystery of this world; Robbie, when I needed Love.
I acquired, however, a certain position of my own in Lawn esteem: the teller of stories. My subject was Aunt Jael; her ways, words and deeds; her rods and ropes; her food and medicine cupboards, her winsome underclothing, awful wrath, and appetite diurnal and nocturnal. I told of the beetle and of the Great God; and of far beatings. The Lawn listened, admired and applauded; admitted in me something they did not possess; the power to interest and to amuse. Thus they decided my fate for me, in showing me the thing in which I was different from and better than others; and Mary Lee, silent and morose by instinct, by upbringing and by environment, set up for life as an amateur-professional raconteuse. That way lay success, and success is what we seek. In forcing myself to talk that I might bask in the amusement of the other children, I gradually lost some of the moodiness and glumness of my earlier days; later on in life, in still more favourable surroundings, I lost them altogether: that is, in the face I showed to the world. The simple need of status with the Lawn children drove me to do the one thing I could do: to talk, and so to discover my talent and overlay my original nature. Thus it is ambition that transforms character, rather than character ambition. Thus it was that Aunt Jael provided me with the capital for my new venture, and paid handsomely for all her oppressions. An eye for an eye, a Lawn laugh for every blow!
The Elementary Educational Establishment was now beneath my needs, so I was transferred from the Misses Clinker (who, while far above vile pecuniary jealousy, prophesied ill) to the seminary of the Misses Primp. The latter were Saints, obscure but regular at the Great Meeting, and socially above the ruck. "Reg'lar standoffish, wi' the pride ur the flesh in their 'earts," declared Miss Salvation, who saw clearly from her altitude far above vile pecuniary jealousy. They held their school in a bleak house with a big bare garden, to the north of the town, ten minutes or so from the Lawn. The curriculum embraced Arithmetic to the Rule of Three, Composition, Grammar, French, Literature (Sacred and Profane), Needlework (Plain and Fancy), Drawing (Freehand and Design); Botany and Brushwork; together with "a thorough grounding in the principles of Salvation."
Not to put too fine a point upon it, this last pretension was a lie. A Bible-reading, usually Kings or Chronicles, read with parrot-quickness round the class, one verse to each pupil; a long dry prayer offered up, with eyes gimletted not on heaven but on us, by Miss Prudence Primp; and a longer and still drier homily by Miss Obedience Primp, a gaunt old lady with a gigantic crinoline and a parched soul and throat—in a later, more worldly age, this allowance of heavenly fare may not seem so niggardly; to me, bred as it were in the imperial purple of Grace, the whole performance appeared perfunctory and tepid, and the Primpian acquaintance with the principles of salvation positively sketchy. My studies were remarkable only for their unevenness. The net result of my inequalities was that I occupied a steady middle-place in the weekly marks. I reflected with pride, however, that it was no ordinary middle-place, the result of humdrum averageness in everything: and I was vainer of being bad at my bad subjects than good at my good ones. Were they not stupid subjects in which a quite special unique set-apart Chosen little girl like myself would not stoop to shine? Tots indeed! Brushwork!
I do not recall many events in my school life. Those that recur to me are chiefly unpleasant; how some of the girls cribbed and copied and cheated and lied; how others giggled sickeningly at the word "boys," or mocked shamefully at their mothers and fathers. They were red-letter days when Cissie King, my Lawn enemy, had a fit, foamed at the mouth, went green in the face, was obdurate under basinsful of water, and only came round at the third dose of brandy; or when Miss Obedience quarrelled openly with Miss Prudence in front of the whole school, and cried "Leave me, woman!" Nor can I forget my first day, when Miss Obedience, as we were leaving after the morning school, asked two of the older girls who lived my way to accompany me home, and I overheard them say to each other "Not likely! We'll leave her at the school gate; wouldn't be seen with her, with her frock all darned and nasty common clothes and boots, would you? If anybody should think she belonged to us!" How my cheeks burned, how I hated and loathed those two giggling little snobs, and still more my own uncomely person and garments. How I brooded for days and gnawed at the shame. These are the real events of a child's life; they sound the depths of human passion: shame, jealousy and hate.
One other major event followed close upon my return. Wedding Bells! For five and forty years had Miss Salvation Clinker been pursuing Brother Brawn; now the long chase was ended, and the quarry at last secured. She was seventy-seven, he but seventy-one. How on a secret visit one morning she broke the news to Grandmother, postponing vainly the Jaelian wrath to come; how later that wrath fell ("Bold woman of Proverbs seven-twelve, who lieth in wait at every corner," said Denouncer; "I shall do more than some as I know, and go to 'Eaven a wedded wife," answered Denounced, brazen in vanishing-maidenhood)—while scorn and pity were showered upon the victim; how Aunt Jael's ban went forth, and the banns despite it; how they became man and wife; how she had her Triumph, and dragged him through the streets of Tawborough in an open carriage ... this and much more I might portray.
The mild scandal in our Meeting was as nothing to the rage and horror in the Upper Room for Celibate Saints. At a solemn mass-meeting of the survivors, nigh half a dozen strong, Doctor Obadiah Tizzard decreed: that Glory Clinker, aider and abetter in evil, be then and thenceforward struck from the sacred roll and flung into outer darkness; that against Salvation, née Clinker, sinner of sinners, be pronounced the Major Excommunication.