South Riding (21 page)

“It’s all right, Midge. Come on. Use my soap if you like. I was only teasing. I didn’t mean really that you were stealing.”

“I should hope not,” said Miss Carne of Maythorpe, haughtily. “And I wouldn’t touch your filthy soap.”

Lydia laughed.

She wanted to laugh all day. All the other classes went well. For dinner there was jam roll. At hockey Miss Becker told her that she would make a very useful half-back. She started to cycle home along a road crackling with frost.

Icicles. Bicycles. That was a lovely rhyme. Who would have thought that there would have been a rhyme for bicycles? She rode balancing along the knife-edged ridge above a wheel track, carolling extemporised verses as she wobbled skilfully:

“Cracking the icicles

All on our bicycles . . .

We’ll get to college one day.”

She cared for nothing, was afraid of nothing. Neither squalling babies nor a scolding mother, neither the crowded van nor jam smeared over her school books, could separate her from the glory which was hers now and which was yet to come.

“I’ve had my eye on you,

A long, long time!”

her happy tuneless voice shouted into the frosty buffeting wind.

She forgot Miss Burton’s detestation of Madame Hubbard’s songs. The words had meant nothing to her. It was of her newly discovered power of writing that she sang, of beauty, of method and order and power and learning, of the divine Sarah who ruled enthroned above these splendours.

“I’ve sighed a sigh for you,

You know I’d die for you

I don’t know
why
I do . . .”

She flung her leg backwards, like a boy, and stood on one pedal, as the bicycle bumped down the cinder-path to the Shacks.

The door of her home was closed. Bert’s cycle was not there yet. Lydia knew better than to dash up the steps to her mother, crying out her great good news that her essay had been recommended for a prize—and in her first term. But she hoped, perhaps after tea, to be able to convey something of this wonder.

From the inner compartment came the sound of children playing and squabbling. But when she opened the door into the kitchen-living-room-parents’ bedroom, she stopped dead.

Tea was not ready. The table was not laid. But there, sprawled across the untidy bunk, her mother lay. And not only lay—marvel enough, on an afternoon. She lay weeping.

“Mother!” cried Lydia.

Mrs. Holly raised her ravaged face.

“Aye. It’s you. Back from school, eh?” She propped herself on her elbow, and looked at her daughter blocking the doorway. Resentment, pride, love, compunction and envy dwelt in that long, steadfast glance.

“What is it?” asked Lydia, hushed.

“You might as well know sooner as later. I’m done for, Lyd. I’m in for it. I’m going to have another. I’ve taken stuff to stop it and half killed myself, but it’s no good.”

“Mother!”

“It’s no good looking at me like that. You’ll be a woman yourself one day and know all about it. Maybe I shouldn’t be talking to you like this; but you’ll have to see the end of it, so you might as well know the beginning.”

“But—the doctor . . .”

“Aye. He said I wasn’t to. Well—it isn’t doctor what has last word. Maybe it will finish me. Then that’ll finish you too. You’ll have to quit your grand school and come home to look after the kids.”

It was as though she took a grim pleasure in breaking her daughter’s dreams. Yet even then Lydia knew, by the understanding which ran between them, that if by dying her mother could have saved her, she would have died. It was her own failure which she was lashing—jeering at the fate which was forcing her to fail her beloved daughter.

Lydia came forward into the bleak, cluttered, comfortless room and closed the door behind her. She understood.

“You lie there. I’ll get tea,” she said.

“Aye. I could do with a cup. I’ve been fairly off my head with pain all day.”

She lay watching Lydia, her eyes glittering with fever. She was perhaps not quite in her right senses.

“Aye,” she muttered. “Get tea again. It was that cup you got us the other night what did it. When Bert was sick. He’d fairly gone off with sleep till you gave him that tea. That roused him up. That did us both in.” Her head fell back on the soiled pillow. “I’ve done no baking. Ask Nancy Mitchell to lend us half a loaf, Lyd, will you?”

I
T WAS
February when the great snow-storm came. For a day and a night snow smothered the South Riding. Drifts blew across the bleak stretches of Cold Harbour Colony, burying by the dozen the huddled sheep. The Council Library van, blinded by the blizzard, was abandoned in a blocked ditch outside North Wirral, the driver barely escaping with his life. Business men, snow-bound on trains, arrived at their Kingsport offices after the lunch hour. From Yarmouth to the Tyne harbours were crowded with shipping sheltering from gigantic seas.

A fierce quarrel broke out between Maythorpe farmers and the Kiplington Urban District Council. For that body had established a public incinerator on the cliffs between the Shacks and Kiplington, and on the first night of the storm the wind had entered the open enclosure and torn papers and posters and strips of rag and cardboard, and whirled them out into the nearby hedges, so that when next day the shepherds and small holders staggered after their sheep in the blinding storm, they saw patches of white along the hedges and struggled to them, to find only rags and rubbish from the refuse pile. It was enough to madden a community of saints.

All Wednesday and Thursday, the storm raged and blustered. By Friday its fury had subsided; a sullen sun gleamed from the ashen sky on to a transfigured landscape.

Sarah sent for Miss Jameson and told her that such dramatic weather was too rare to waste in classrooms.

“The girls may never see anything like it again, I’m told that it’s forty years since snow lay thick on the shore. We won’t have any afternoon classes. Scrap everything. Those girls who are fit will take part in a tracking game—day girls and boarders. Ask Miss Becker to come and see me, will you?”

Miss Jameson disapproved of Miss Burton’s sudden decision to turn an afternoon’s time-table upside down. Not thus had Miss Holmes acted. But since the arrangement meant more leisure for herself, she made no protest. It was Miss Sigglesthwaite, the science mistress, who appeared, flushed and palpitating, to explain that she had taken special trouble to prepare a demonstration class on snow crystals for the Fifth form, and to ask whether Miss Burton thought it quite fair to upset the girls like this in the middle of term.

“I shouldn’t think it fair not to,” smiled Sarah, sitting back in her chair and contemplating her science mistress.

She wished that Miss Sigglesthwaite would take offence and resign from the staff. One day she might have to drive her to do this, for she feared that the science mistress would never give her adequate cause for dismissal. Academically, she was the most distinguished member of Kiplington Staff. Her degree was excellent. She wrote papers for
Botany
and twice her letters, over a column long, had been published in
Nature.
One on “Variations in chromosome numbers in sexual and asexual individuals among Phœphyccæ” had involved her in a learned correspondence with a young reader in botany at Cambridge. But an aptitude for the study of seaweeds has little relationship to a gift for teaching. Tall, faded, nervous, with a nose perpetually polished by dyspepsia, and dust-coloured hair that dripped from a dreary bun, Miss Sigglesthwaite justified all too well the libels spread by their detractors about school teachers. Sarah considered her influence, her appearance, her ineffectiveness, bad for the school. She guessed that children not only terrified but bored her. She was both too good and too bad for her position. Sooner or later—in spite of
Phæphyccæ,
Miss Sigglesthwaite must go.

Sarah smiled blandly at her and explained: “You see, nothing like this may ever happen again. It will be an experience for the girls to remember long after, perhaps, they’ve forgotten all that we can teach them—oh, and talking of teaching, by the way, Miss Sigglesthwaite, we must do something about Form IV Upper. We really can’t have another mass refusal.”

“Miss Holmes realised that it was useless to start science before the Fifths.”

Poor devil, thought Miss Sarah. This is desperate for her. There’s an invalid mother, isn’t there?

“But you see,” she pressed, patiently, “some of these girls will take science for their matric. I don’t want them to scramble all their work into the last few terms. I want them to learn to think along scientific lines.”

She smiled to herself at the farce of Jill Jackson and Gladys Hubbard learning to think along scientific lines, but she knew what she meant. Almost anything could be done in teaching by enthusiasm and self-confidence. At South London she herself had worked miracles with lumpish adolescents. Miss Sigglesthwaite must learn to work miracles, or go.

She repeated her point with gentle ruthlessness. Agnes Sigglesthwaite, aware of the hidden menace in that bland manner, trailed off, despairing. She was all too conscious of her own shortcomings, of her fanatical responsibilities, and of the weakness of her position. The delight planned by Miss Burton that day for her school children did not include the science mistress—and she knew it; but in a clash of interest between girls and staff, Sarah never hesitated in her choice.

It was nearly three o’clock when Sarah joined the tracking party. The plan was that Miss Becker and two of the senior girls should set off on a route known to themselves and Sarah alone. Ten minutes later the others with Miss Masters and Miss Ritchie should follow their trail, wherever it might lead.

Sarah, having answered twenty-two letters, interviewed a mother whose girl had septic tonsils, inspected a burst pipe, discussed with Miss Parsons the comparative merits of brown and wholemeal bread, and accepted an invitation from Jerry Bryan to hear him sing the bass solos in a performance of the
Messiah
at Kingsport on Easter Sunday, set off in her car to an appointed rendezvous with the runners on Maythorpe Cliffs.

The car was open, but, muffled in furs to the nose, she did not feel cold. The road through the town was polished like white porcelain. A wild wind blew the tossing seagulls about the esplanade, wheeling and shrieking.

How right I was. They’ll never forget this, she congratulated herself. The day might have been a present which she had made to please and amuse her girls.

The road led south through the outskirts of the town, passing small, neat bungalows and urban villas. She thought of the lives of women in little houses—adding accounts and writing grocery lists, carrying trays to invalids, washing babies, nursing the very young, the very old, the sick, the helpless, waiting for letters, reading school reports, mourning beside the bodies of the dead.

Life could be very drab and very bitter, she thought. She wondered a little about poor Miss Sigglesthwaite.

But her hands tightened on the wheel as she swung her car cleverly past a lumbering bus and off the main road south to Maythorpe village. There was all the more reason why she must fortify her children, equip them with knowledge and confidence and ambition, arm them with weapons to fight the deadening monotony of life, arm them with joy, with memories, with passion. She would challenge them to make something better of their lives than their parents had done. She would inoculate their minds with her own gospel of resolution and intelligence. “Go therefore, and do that which is within you to do. Take no heed of gestures that beckon you aside. Ask of no man permission to perform “—that was the motto she gave to the girls who left her care to become housewives, typists, children’s nurses, shop assistants. She laughed at her extravagance of vision. Oh, but that wasn’t what she meant. It was something unexpected and spontaneous—an afternoon snatched from the fixed routine of time-tables, a chance of joy, a burst of music, an insistence upon beauty or pleasure or daring. Something positive and wild and lovely—like driving out before the dawn to Greenwich and watching the ships sail up the silver Thames.

A gate to a field road towards the cliff was open. The farmer had been carting turnips from an opened pit. Fragments of rotting root lay on the frozen road. It would be hard going, but possible. She turned in, enjoying the difficulty of driving along the slippery, pitted track between shining drifts.

Scuttering and slithering over the rutted snow, she passed through three open gateways, and found herself right on the edge of the cliff where, sure enough, according to plan, she saw the track of the “hares” leading down a slope where the earth had fallen on to the snow-covered shore.

Then she waited, hanging, it seemed, suspended between the white frozen earth and black tumbling sea.

An extraordinary scene, she found it, a reversal of natural colour. The foam blown back from the fringe of the waves was white; the gulls were white; white snow shrouded the sands and piled against the cliff; but the retreating tide stained its shining surface with huge black semicircles; the water was black; the sombre sky was ashen; away to the north lay Kiplington, a litter of black walls under white roofs scattered along the shore. The sheltering ships rode huge and dark above the angry water. The sun hung like a painted circle in a child’s landscape giving no obvious illumination. All light came from the white, transforming snow.