The Getting of Wisdom (10 page)

Thus did Laura apply herself to reach the school ideal, thus force herself to drive hard nails of fact into her vagrant thoughts. And with success. For she had, it turned out, a retentive memory, and to her joy learning by heart came easy to her—as easy as to the most brilliant scholars in the form. From now on she gave this talent full play, memorising even pages of the history book in her zeal; and before many weeks had passed, in all lessons except those in arithmetic—you could not, alas! get sums by rote—she was separated from Inez and Bertha by the width of the class.

But neither her taste of friendship and its comforts, nor the abrupt change for the better in her class-fortunes, could counterbalance Laura's luckless knack of putting her foot in it. This she continued to do, in season and out of season. And not with the authorities alone.

There was, for instance, that unfortunate evening when she was one of the batch of girls invited to Mrs. Strachey's drawingroom. Laura, ignorant of what it meant to be blasee, had received her note of invitation with a thrill, had even enjoyed writing, in her best hand, the prescribed formula of acceptance. But she was alone in this; by the majority of her companions these weekly parties were frankly hated, the chief reason being that every guest was expected to take a piece of music with her. Even the totally unfit had to show what they could do. And the fact that cream-tarts were served for supper was not held to square accounts.

"It's all very well for you," grumbled Laura's room-mate, Lilith Gordon, as she lathered her thick white arms and neck before dressing. "You're a new girl; you probably won't be asked."

Laura did not give the matter a second thought: hastily selecting a volume of music, she followed the rest of the white dresses into the passage. The senior girl tapped at the drawingroom door. It was opened by no other than the Principal himself.

In the girls' eyes, Mr. Strachey stood over six feet in his stocking-soles. He had also a most arrogant way of looking down his nose, and of tugging, intolerantly, at his long, drooping moustache. There was little need for him to assume the frigid contemptuousness of Mrs. Gurley's manner: his mere presence, the very unseeingness of his gaze, inspired awe. Tales ran of his wrath, were it roused; but few had experienced it. He quelled the high spirits of these young [P.93] colonials by his dignified air of detachment.

Now, however, he stood there affable and smiling, endeavouring to put a handful of awkward girls at their ease. But neither his nor Mrs. Strachey's efforts availed. It was impossible for the pupils to throw off, at will, the crippling fear that governed their relations with the Principal. To them, his amiability resembled the antics of an uncertain-tempered elephant, with which you could never feel safe.— Besides on this occasion it was a young batch, and of particularly mixed stations. And so a dozen girls, from twelve to fifteen years old, sat on the extreme edges of their chairs, and replied to what was said to them, with dry throats.

Though the youngest of the party, Laura was the least embarrassed: she had never known a nursery, but had mixed with her elders since her babyhood. And she was not of a shy disposition; indeed, she still had to be reminded daily that shyness was expected of her. So she sat and looked about her. It was an interesting room in which she found herself. Low bookshelves, three shelves high, ran round the walls, and on the top shelf were many outlandish objects. What an evening it would have been had Mr. Strachey invited them to examine these ornaments, or to handle the books, instead of having to pick up a title here and there by chance.—From the shelves, her eyes strayed to the pictures on the walls; one, in particular struck her fancy. It hung over the mantelpiece, and was a man's head seen in profile, with a long hooked nose, and wearing a kind of peaked cap. But that was not all: behind this head were other profiles of the same face, and seeming to come out of clouds. Laura stared hard, but could make nothing of it.—And meanwhile her companions were rising with sickly smiles, to seat themselves, red as turkey-cocks' combs, on the piano stool, where with cold, stiff fingers they stumbled through the movement of a sonata or sonatina.

It was Lilith Gordon who broke the chain by offering to sing. The diversion was welcomed by Mrs. Strachey, and Lilith went to the piano. But her nervousness was such that she broke down half-way in the little prelude to the ballad.

Mrs. Strachey came to the rescue. "It's so difficult, is it not, to accompany oneself?" she said kindly. "Perhaps one of the others would play for you?"

No one moved.

"Do any of you know the song?"

Two or three ungraciously admitted the knowledge, but none volunteered.

It was here Laura chimed in. "I could play it," she said; and coloured at the sound of her own voice.

Mrs. Strachey looked doubtfully at the thin little girl. "Do you know it, dear? You're too young for singing, I think."

"No, I don't know it. But I could play it from sight. It's quite easy."

Everyone looked disbelieving, especially the unhappy singer.

"I've played much harder things than that," continued Laura.

"Well, perhaps you might try," said Mrs. Strachey, with the ingrained distrust of the unmusical.

Laura rose and went to the piano, where she conducted the song to a successful ending.

Mrs. Strachey looked relieved. "Very nice indeed." And to Laura: "Did you say you didn't know it, dear?"

"No, I never saw it before."

Again the lady looked doubtful. "Well, perhaps you would play us something yourself now?"

Laura had no objection; she had played to people before her fingers were long enough to cover the octave. She took the volume of Thalberg she had brought with her, selected "Home, Sweet Home", and pranced in.

Her audience kept utter silence; but, had she been a little sharper, she would have grasped that it was the silence of amazement. After the prim sonatinas that had gone before, Thalberg's florid ornaments had a shameless sound. Her performance, moreover, was a startling one; the forte pedal was held down throughout; the big chords were crashed and banged with all the strength a pair of twelve-year-old arms could put into them; and wrong notes were freely scattered. Still, rhythm and melody were well marked, and there was no mistaking the agility of the small fingers.

Dead silence, too, greeted the conclusion of the piece Several girls were very red, from trying not to laugh. The Principal tugged at his moustache, in abstracted fashion.

Laura had reached her seat again before Mrs. Strachey said undecidedly: "Thank you, dear. Did you . . . hm . . . learn that piece here?"

Laura saw nothing wrong. "Oh, no, at home," she answered. "I wouldn't care to play the things I learn here, to people. They're so dull."

A girl emitted a faint squeak. But a half turn of Mrs. Strachey's head subdued her. "Oh, I hope you will soon get to like classical music also," said the lady gravely, and in all good faith. "We prefer it, you know, to any other."

"Do you mean things like the AIR IN G WITH VARIATIONS? I'm afraid I never shall. There's no tune in them."

Music was as fatal to Laura's equilibrium as wine would have been. Finding herself next Mr. Strachey, she now turned to him and said, with what she believed to be ease of manner: "Mr. Strachey, will you please tell me what that picture is hanging over the mantelpiece? I've been looking at it ever since I came in, but I can't make it out. Are those ghosts, those things behind the man, or what?"

It took Mr. Strachey a minute to recover from his astonishment. He stroked hard, and the look he bent on Laura was not encouraging.

"It seems to be all the same face," continued the child, her eyes on the picture.

"That," said Mr. Strachey, with extreme deliberation: "that is the portrait, by a great painter, of a great poet—Dante Alighieri."

"Oh, Dante, is it?" said Laura showily—she had once heard the name. "Oh, yes, of course, I know now. He wrote a book, didn't he, called FAUST? I saw it over there by the door.—What lovely books!"

But here Mr. Strachey abruptly changed his seat, and Laura's thirst for information was left unquenched.

The evening passed, and she was in blessed ignorance of anything being amiss, till the next morning after breakfast she was bidden to Mrs. Gurley.

A quarter of an hour later, on her emerging from that lady's private sitting-room, her eyes were mere swollen slits in her face. Instead, however, of sponging them in cold water and bravely joining her friends, Laura was still foolish enough to hide and have her cry out. So that when the bell rang, she was obliged to go in to public prayers looking a prodigious fright, and thereby advertising to the curious what had taken place.

Mrs. Gurley had crushed and humiliated her. Laura learnt that she had been guilty of a gross impertinence, in profaning the ears of the Principal and Mrs. Strachey with Thalberg's music, and that all the pieces she had brought with her from home would now be taken from her. Secondly, Mr. Strachey had been so unpleasantly impressed by the boldness of her behaviour, that she would not be invited to the drawing-room again for some time to come.

The matter of the music touched Laura little: if they preferred their dull old exercises to what she had offered them, so much the worse for them. But the reproach cast on her manners stung her even more deeply than it had done when she was still the raw little newcomer: for she had been pluming herself of late that she was now "quite the thing".

And yet, painful as was this fresh overthrow of her pride, it was neither the worst nor the most lasting result of the incident. That concerned her schoolfellows. By the following morning the tale of her doings was known to everyone. It was circulated in the first place, no doubt, by Lilith Gordon, who bore her a grudge for her offer to accompany the song: had Laura not put herself forward in this objectionable way, Lilith might have escaped singing altogether. Lilith also resented her having shown that she could do it—and this feeling was generally shared. It evidenced a want of good-fellowship, and made you very glad the little prig had afterwards come to grief: if you had abilities that others had not you concealed them, instead of parading them under people's noses.

In short, Laura had committed a twofold breach of school etiquette. No one of course vouchsafed to explain this to her; these things one did not put into words, things you were expected to know without telling. Hence, she never more than half understood what she had done. She only saw disapproval painted on faces that had hitherto been neutral, and from one or two quarters got what was unmistakably the cold shoulder.— Her little beginnings at popularity had somehow received a setback, and through her own foolish behaviour.

The lesson went home; Laura began to model herself more and more on those around her; to grasp that the unpardonable sin is to vary from the common mould.

In August, after the midwinter holidays, she was promoted to the second class; she began Latin; and as a reward was allowed by Mother to wear her dresses an inch below her knees. She became a quick, adaptable pupil, with a parrot-like memory, and at the end of the school year delighted Mother's heart with a couple of highly gilt volumes, of negligible contents.

At home, during those first holidays, she gave her sister and brothers cold creeps down their spines, with her stories of the great doings that took place at school; and none of her class-mates would have recognised in this arrant drawer-of-the-long-bow, the unlucky little blunderbuss of the early days.

On her return, Laura's circle of friends was enlarged. The morning after her arrival, on entering the dining-hall, she found a new girl standing shy and awkward before the fireplace. This was the daughter of a millionaire squatter named Macnamara; and the report of her father's wealth had preceded her. Yet here she now had to hang about, alone, unhappy, the target of all eyes. It might be supposed that Laura would feel some sympathy for her, having so recently undergone the same experience herself. But that was not her way. She rejoiced, in barbarian fashion, that this girl, older than she by about a year, and of a higher social standing, should have to endure a like ordeal. Staring heartlessly, she accentuated her part of old girl knowing all the ropes, and was so inclined to show off that she let herself in for a snub from Miss Snodgrass.

Tilly Macnamara joined Laura's class, and the two were soon good friends.

Tilly was a short, plump girl, with white teeth, rather boyish hands, and the blue-grey eyes predominant in Australia. She was usually dressed in silk, and she never wore an apron to protect the front of her frock. Naturally, too, she had a bottomless supply of pocket-money: if a subscription were raised, she gave ten shillings where others gave one; and on the Saturday holidays she flung about with half-crowns as Laura would have been afraid to do with pennies.

For the latter with her tiny dole, which had to last so and so long, since no more was forthcoming, it was a difficult task to move gracefully among companions none of whom knew what it meant to be really poor. Many trivial mortifications were the result; and countless small subterfuges had to be resorted to, to prevent it leaking out just how paltry her allowance was.

But the question of money was, after all, trifling, compared with the infinitely more important one of dress.

With regard to dress, Laura's troubles were manifold. It was not only that here, too, by reason of Mother's straitened means, she was forced to remain an outsider: that, in itself, she would have borne [P.101] lightly; for, as little girls go, she was indifferent to finery. Had she had a couple of new frocks a year, in which she could have been neat and unremarkable, she would have been more than content. But, from her babyhood on, Laura—and Pin with her—had lamented the fact that children could not go about clad in sacks, mercifully indistinguishable one from another. For they were the daughters of an imaginative mother, and, balked in other outlets, this imagination had wreaked itself on their clothing. All her short life long, Laura had suffered under a home-made, picturesque style of dress; and she had resented, with a violence even Mother did not gauge, this use of her young body as a peg on which to hang fantastic garments. After her tenth birthday she was, she thanked goodness, considered too old for the quaint shapes beneath which Pin still groaned; but there remained the matter of colour for Mother to sin against, and in this she seemed to grow more intemperate year by year. Herself dressed always in the soberest browns and blacks, she liked to see her young flock gay as Paradise birds, lighting up a drab world; and when Mother liked a thing, she was not given to consulting the wishes of little people. Those were awful times when she went, say, to Melbourne, and bought as a bargain a whole roll of cloth of an impossible colour, which had to be utilised to the last inch; or when she unearthed, from an old trunk, some antiquated garment to be cut up and reshaped—a Paisley shawl, a puce ball-dress, even an old pair of green rep curtains.