“No,” said Miss Jones.
Meanwhile, that morning descent into the schoolroom was real hell for her. She had to summon up her courage, walking about her bedroom, pressing her hands together, evoking the memory of her magnificent iron-souled brother, who would, she knew, despise such tremors. If only she could have discovered some remedy! But sentiment, attempted tyranny, anger, contempt, at all these things they laughed. She could not touch them anywhere. And she saw Jeremy as a real child of Evil in the very baldest sense. She could not imagine how anyone so young could be so cruel, so heartless, so maliciously clever in his elaborate machinations. She regarded him with real horror, and on the occasions when she found him acting kindly towards his sisters or a servant, or when she watched him discoursing solemnly to Hamlet, she was helplessly puzzled, and decided that these better manifestations were simply masks to hide his devilish young heart. She perceived meanwhile the inevitable crisis slowly approaching, when she would be compelled to invite Mrs. Cole's support. That would mean her dismissal and a hopeless future. There was no one to whom she might turn. She had not a relation, not a friend—too late to make friends now.
She could see nothing in front of her at all.
The crisis did come, but not as she expected it.
There arrived a morning when the dark mist outside and badly made porridge inside tempted the children to their very worst. Miss Jones had had a wakeful night struggling with neuralgia and her own hesitating spirit. The children had lost even their customary half-humourous, half-contemptuous reserve. They let themselves appear for what they were—infant savages discontented with food, weather and education.
I will not detail the incidents of that morning. The episodes that were on other mornings games were today tortures. There was the Torture of Losing Things, the Torture of Not Hearing, the Torture of Many Noises, the Torture of Sudden Alarm, the Torture of Outright Defiance, the Torture of Expressed Contempt. When twelve struck and the children were free, Miss Jones was not far from a nervous panic that can be called, without any exaggeration, incipient madness. The neuralgia tore at her brain, her own self-contempt tore at her heart, her baffled impotence bewildered and blinded her. She did not leave the schoolroom with the children, but went to the broad window-sill and sat there looking out into the dreary prospect. Then, suddenly for no reason except general weakness and physical and spiritual collapse she began to cry.
Jeremy was considered to have a cold, and was, therefore, not permitted to accompany his mother and sisters on an exciting shopping expedition, which would certainly lead as far as old Poole's, the bookseller, and might even extend to Martins', the pastrycook, who made lemon biscuits next door to the Cathedral. He was, therefore, in a very bad temper indeed when he returned sulkily to the schoolroom. He stood for a moment there unaware that there was anybody in the room, hesitating as to whether he should continue “A Flat Iron for a Farthing” or hunt up Hamlet. Suddenly he heard the sound of sobbing. He turned and saw Miss Jones.
He would have fled had flight been in any way possible, but she had looked up and seen him, and her sudden arrested sniff held them both there as though by some third invisible power. He saw that she was crying; he saw her red nose, mottled cheeks, untidy hair. It was the most awful moment of his young life. He had never seen a grown-up person cry before; he had no idea that they ever did cry. He had, indeed, never realised that grown-up persons had any active histories at all, any histories in the sense in which he and Mary had them. They were all a background, simply a background that blew backwards and forwards like tapestry according to one's need of them. His torture of Miss Jones had been founded on no sort of realisation of her as a human being; she had been a silly old woman, of course, but just as the battered weather-beaten Aunt Sally in the garden was a silly old woman.
Her crying horrified, terrified, and disgusted him. It was all so dreary, the horrible weather outside, the beginning of a cold in his head, the schoolroom fire almost out, everyone's bad temper, including his own, and this sudden horrible jumping-to-life of a grown-up human being. She, meanwhile, was too deeply involved now in the waters of her affliction to care very deeply who saw her or what anyone said to her. She did feel dimly that she ought not to be crying in front of a small boy of eight years old, and that it would be better to hide herself in her bedroom, but she did not mind—she COULD not mind—her neuralgia was too bad.
“It's the neuralgia in my head,” she said in a muffled confused voice. That he could understand. He also had pains in his head. He drew closer to her, flinging a longing backward look at the door. She went on in convulsed tones: