Superseded

by May Sinclair

She stayed on and taught arithmetic for one thing. And when she was not teaching arithmetic, she was giving little dictations, setting little themes, controlling some fifty young and very free translators of Le Philosophe sous les Toils. Miss Quincey had a passion for figures and for everything that could be expressed in figures. Not a pure passion, nothing to do with the higher mathematics, which is the love of the soul, but an affection sadly alloyed with baser matter, with rods and perches, firkins and hogsheads, and articles out of the grocer's shop.

Among these objects Miss Quincey's imagination ran voluptuous riot. But upon such things as history or poetry she had a somewhat blighting influence. The flowers in the school Anthology withered under her fingers, and the flesh and blood of heroes crumbled into the dust of dates. As for the philosopher under the roofs, who he was, and what was his philosophy, and how he ever came to be under the roofs at all, nobody in St. Sidwell's ever knew or ever cared to know; Miss Quincey had made him eternally uninteresting. Yet Miss Quincey's strength was in her limitations. It was the strength of unreasoning but undying conviction. Nothing could shake her belief in the supreme importance of arithmetic and the majesty of its elementary rules. Pale and persistent and intolerably meek, she hammered hard facts into the brain with a sort of muffled stroke, hammered till the hardest stuck by reason of their hardness, for she was a teacher of the old school. Thus in her own way she made her mark. Among the other cyphers, the irrelevant and insignificant figure of Miss Quincey was indelibly engraved on many an immortal soul. There was a curious persistency about Miss Quincey.

Miss Quincey was not exactly popular. The younger teachers pronounced her cut and dried; for dryness, conscientiously acquired, passed for her natural condition. Nobody knew that it cost her much effort and industry to be so stiff and starched; that the starch had to be put on fresh every morning; that it was quite a business getting up her limp little personality for the day. In five-and-twenty years, owing to an incurable malady of shyness, she had never made friends with any of her pupils.

Her one exception proved her rule. Miss Quincey seemed to have gone out of her way to attract that odious little Laura Lazarus, who was known at St. Sidwell's as the Mad Hatter. At fourteen, being still incapable of adding two and two together, the Mad Hatter had been told off into an idiot's class by herself for arithmetic; and Miss Quincey, because she was so meek and patient and persistent, was told off to teach her. The child, a queer, ugly little pariah, half-Jew, half-Cockney, held all other girls in abhorrence, and was avoided by them with an equal loathing. She seemed to have attached herself to the unpopular teacher out of sheer perversity and malignant contempt of public opinion. Abandoned in their corner, with their heads bent together over the sums, the two outsiders clung to each other in a common misery and isolation.

Miss Quincey was well aware that she was of no account at St. Sidwell's. She supposed that it was because she had never taken her degree. To be sure she had never tried to take it; but it was by no means certain that she could have taken it if she had tried. She was not clever; Louisa had carried off all the brains and the honours of the family. It had been considered unnecessary for Juliana to develop an individuality of her own; enough for her that she belonged to Louisa, and was known as Louisa's sister. Louisa's sister was a part of Louisa; Louisa was a part of St. Sidwell's College, Regent's Park; and St. Sidwell's College, Regent's Park, was a part—no, St. Sidwell's was the whole; it was the glorious world. Miss Quincey had never seen, or even desired to see any other. That college was to her a place of exquisite order and light. Light that was filtered through the high tilted windows, and reflected from a prevailing background of green tiles and honey-white pine, from countless rows of shining desks and from hundreds of young faces. Light, the light of ideas, that streamed from the platform in the great hall where three times in the year Miss Cursiter gave her address to the students and teachers of St. Sidwell's.

Now Miss Cursiter was a pioneer at war with the past, a woman of vast ambitions, a woman with a system and an end; and she chose her instruments finely, toiling early and late to increase their brilliance and efficiency. She was new to St. Sidwell's, and would have liked to make a clean sweep of the old staff and to fill their places with women like Rhoda Vivian, young and magnificent and strong. As it was, she had been weeding them out gradually, as opportunity arose; and the new staff, modern to its finger-tips, was all but complete and perfect now. Only Miss Quincey remained. St. Sidwell's in the weeding time had not been a bed of roses for Miss Cursiter, and Miss Quincey, blameless but incompetent, was a thorn in her side, a thorn that stuck. Impossible to remove Miss Quincey quickly, she was so very blameless and she worked so hard.

She worked from nine till one in the morning, from two-thirty till four-thirty in the afternoon, and from six-thirty in the evening till any hour in the night. She worked with the desperate zeal of the superseded who knows that she holds her post on sufferance, the terrified tenacity of the middle-aged who feels behind her the swift-footed rivalry of youth. And the more she worked the more she annoyed Miss Cursiter.

So now, above all the tramping and shuffling and hissing, you heard the self-restrained and slightly metallic utterance of the Head.

"Stand back, Miss Quincey, if you please."

And Miss Quincey stood back, flattening herself against the wall, and the procession passed her by, rosy, resonant, exulting, a triumph of life.