Joan and Peter — The High Cross Preparatory School Part 2
§ 7 So it was that Mr. Grimes, acting for Lady Charlotte, set about the rescue of Joan and Peter from, as she put it, “the freaks, faddists and Hill-Top philosophies of the Surrey hills,” and their restoration to the established sobrieties and decorums of English life.
Very naturally this sudden action came as an astonishing blow to the two advanced aunts.
At nine o’clock that evening Miss Murgatroyd was called down to see Miss Phyllis Stubland, who had ridden over on her bicycle.
“Where are the children?
” asked Aunt Phyllis.
“You sent for them,” said Miss Murgatroyd.
“Sent for them!
” “Yes.
I remember now.
The young man said it was Lady Charlotte Sydenham.
Didn’t you know?
She is going abroad tomorrow or the next day.
” “Sent for them!
” Aunt Phyllis repeated....
Two hours later Aunt Phyllis was telling the terrible news to Mary.
Aunt Phœbe was in London for the night to see Mr. Tree play _Richard II_, and there were no means of communicating with her until the morning.
The Ingle-Nook was much too Pre-Raphaelite to possess a telephone, and Aunt Phœbe was sleeping at the flat of a friend in Church Row, Hampstead.
Next morning a telegram found her still in bed.
“Children kidnapped by Lady Charlotte consult Sycamore Phyllis” said the telegram.
“_No!
_” cried Aunt Phœbe sharply.
Then as the little servant-maid was on the point of closing the door, “Tell Miss Jepson,” Aunt Phœbe commanded....
Miss Jepson found Aunt Phœbe out of bed and dressing with a rapid casualness.
It was manifest that some great crisis had happened.
“An outrage upon all women,” said Aunt Phœbe.
“I have been outraged.
” “My dear!
” said Miss Jepson.
“Read that telegram!
” cried Aunt Phœbe, pointing to a small ball of pink paper in the corner of the room.
Miss Jepson went over to the corner with a perplexed expression, and smoothed out the telegram and read it.
“A _Bradshaw_ and a hansom!
” Aunt Phœbe was demanding as she moved rapidly about the room from one scattered garment to another.
“No breakfast.
I can eat nothing.
Nothing.
I am a tigress.
A maddened tigress.
Maddened.
Beyond endurance.
Oh!
Can you reach these buttons, dear?
” Miss Jepson hovered about her guest readjusting her costume in accordance with commonplace standards while Aunt Phœbe expressed herself in Sibylline utterances.
“Children dedicated to the future....
Reek of ancient corruptions....
Abomination of desolation....
The nine fifty-three....
Say half an hour....
Remonstrance....
An avenging sword....
The sword of the Lord and of Gideon.
” “Are you going to this Mr. Sycamore?
” asked Miss Jepson suddenly.
Aunt Phœbe seemed lost for a time and emerged with, “Good God!
—_No!
_ This is an occasion when a woman must show she can act as a man.
This tries us, Amanda.
I will have no man in this.
No man at all!
Are women to loll in hareems for ever while men act and fight?
When little children are assailed?...
” “Chastlands,” said Aunt Phœbe to the cabman, waving Miss Jepson’s _Bradshaw_ in her hand.
The man looked stupid.
“Oh!
Charing Cross,” she cried scornfully.
“The rest is beyond you.
” And in the train she startled her sole fellow-traveller and made him get out at the next station by saying suddenly twice over in her loud, clear contralto voice the one word “_Action_.
” She left Miss Jepson’s _Bradshaw_ in the compartment when she got out.
She found Chastlands far gone in packing for Lady Charlotte’s flight abroad.
“I demand Lady Charlotte,” she said.
She followed up old Cashel as he went to announce her.
He heard her coming behind him, but his impression of her was so vivid that he deemed it wiser not to notice this informality.
And besides in his dry, thin way he wanted to hear why she demanded Lady Charlotte.
He perceived the possibilities of a memorable clash.
He was a quiet, contemplative man who hid his humour like a miser’s treasure and lived much upon his memories.
Weeks after a thing had happened he would suddenly titter, in bed, or in church, or while he was cleaning his plate.
And none were told why he tittered.
For a moment Aunt Phœbe hovered on the landing outside the Chastlands drawing-room.
“I can’t see her,” she heard Lady Charlotte say, with something like a note of terror.
“It is impossible.
” “Leave her to me, me Lady,” said a man’s voice.
“Tell her to wait, Cashel,” said Lady Charlotte.
Aunt Phœbe entered, trailing her artistic robes.
Before her by the writing-table in the big window stood Lady Charlotte, flounced, bonneted, dressed as if for instant flight.
A slender, fair, wincing man in grey stood nearer, his expression agitated but formidable.
They had evidently both risen to their feet as Aunt Phœbe entered.
Cashel made insincere demonstrations of intervention, but Aunt Phœbe disposed of him with a gesture.
A haughty and terrible politeness was in her manner, but she sobbed slightly as she spoke.
“Lady Charlotte,” she said, “where are my wards?
” “They are _my_ wards,” said Lady Charlotte no less haughtily.
“Excuse me, Lady Charlotte.
Permit me,” said Mr. Grimes, with soothing gestures of his lean white hands.
“Please do not intervene,” said Aunt Phœbe.
“Mr. Grimes, madam, is my solicitor,” said Lady Charlotte.
“You may go, Cashel.
” Cashel went reluctantly.
Mr. Grimes advanced a step and dandled his hands and smiled ingratiatingly.
Italian and Spanish women will stab, he had heard, and fishwives are a violent class.
Otherwise he believed all women, however terrible in appearance, to be harmless.
This gave him courage.
“Miss Stubland, I believe,” he said.
“These young people, young Stubland and his foster-sister to wit, are at present in my charge—under instructions from Lady Charlotte.
” “Where?
” asked Aunt Phœbe.
“Our case, Miss Stubland, is that they were not being properly educated in your charge.
That is our case.
They were receiving no sound moral and religious training, and they were being brought up in—to say the least of it—an eccentric fashion.
Our aim in taking them out of your charge is to secure for them a proper ordinary English bringing up.
” “Every word an insult,” panted Aunt Phœbe.
“Every word.
What have you done with them?
” “Until we are satisfied that you will consent to continue their training on proper lines, Miss Stubland, you can scarcely expect us to put it in your power to annoy these poor children further.
” Mr. Grimes’ face was wincing much more than usual, and these involuntary grimaces affected Aunt Phœbe in her present mood as though they were deliberate insults.
He did not allow for this added exasperation.
“Annoy!
” cried Aunt Phœbe.
“That is the usual expression.
We are perfectly within our rights in refusing you access.
Having regard to your manifest determination to upset any proper arrangement.
” “You refuse to let me know where those children are?
” “Unless you can get an order against us.
” “You mean—go to some old judge?
” Mr. Grimes gesticulated assent.
If she chose to phrase it in that way, so much the worse for her application.
“You won’t—— You will go on with this kidnapping?
” “Miss Stubland, we are entirely satisfied with our present course and our present position.
” Lady Charlotte endorsed him with three great nods.
Aunt Phœbe stood aghast.
Mr. Grimes remained quietly triumphant.
Lady Charlotte stood quietly triumphant behind him.
For a moment it seemed as if Aunt Phœbe had no reply of any sort to make.
Then suddenly she advanced three steps and seized upon Mr. Grimes.
One hand gripped his nice grey coat below the collar behind, the other, the looseness of his waistcoat just below the tie.
And lifting him up upon his toes Aunt Phœbe shook him.
Mr. Grimes was a lean, spare, ironical man.
Aunt Phœbe was a well-developed woman.
Yet only by an enormous effort did she break the instinctive barriers that make a man sacred from feminine assault.
It was an effort so enormous that when at last it broke down the dam of self-restraint, it came through a boiling flood of physical power.
It came through with a sort of instantaneousness.
At one moment Mr. Grimes stood before Lady Charlotte’s eyes dominating the scene; at the next he was, as materialists say of the universe, “all vibrations.
” He was a rag, he was a scrap of carpet in Aunt Phœbe’s hands.
The appetite for shaking seemed to grow in Aunt Phœbe as she shook.
From the moment when Aunt Phœbe gripped him until she had done shaking him nobody except Lady Charlotte made an articulate sound.
And all that Lady Charlotte said, before astonishment overcame her, was one loud “Haw!
” The face of Mr. Grimes remained set, except for a certain mechanical rattling of the teeth in a wild stare at Aunt Phœbe; Aunt Phœbe’s features bore that earnest calm one may see upon the face of a good woman who washes clothes or kneads bread.
Then suddenly it was as if Aunt Phœbe woke up out of a trance.
“You make—you make me forget myself!
” said Aunt Phœbe with a low sob, and after one last shake relinquished him.
Mr. Grimes gyrated for a moment and came to rest against a massive table.
He was still staring at Aunt Phœbe.
For a moment the three people remained breathing heavily and contemplating the outrage.
At last Mr. Grimes was able to raise a wavering, pointing finger to gasp, “You have—you have—yes—indeed—forgotten yourself!
” Then, as if he struggled to apprehend the position, “You—you have assaulted me.
” “Let it be—let it be a warning to you,” said Aunt Phœbe.
“That is a threat.
” “Agreed,” panted Aunt Phœbe with spirit, though she had not meant to threaten him at all.
“If you think, madam, that you can assault me with impunity——” “I shouldn’t have thought it—before I took hold of you.
A bag of bones....
Man indeed!
” And then very earnestly—“_Yes.
_” She paused.
The pause held all three of them still.
“But why—oh, why!
—should I bandy words with such a thing as you?
” she asked with a sudden belated recovery of her dignity.
“_You—_” She sought her word carefully.
“Flibber-gib!
” And forgetting altogether the mission upon which she had come, Aunt Phœbe turned about to make her exit from the scene.
It seemed to her, perhaps justly, that it was impossible to continue the parley further.
“Legalized scoundrel!
” she said over her shoulder, and moved towards the door.
In that first tremendous clash of the New Woman and the Terrific Old Lady, it must be admitted that the New Woman carried off, so to speak, the physical honours.
Lady Charlotte stood against the fireplace visibly appalled.
Only when Aunt Phœbe was already at the door did it occur to Lady Charlotte to ring the bell to have her visitor “shown out.
” Her shaking hand could scarcely find the bell handle.
For the rest she was ineffective, wasting great opportunities for scorn and dignity.
She despised herself for not having a larger, fiercer solicitor.
She doubted herself.
For the first time in her life Lady Charlotte Sydenham doubted herself, and quailed before a new birth of time.
Upon the landing appeared old Cashel, mutely respectful.
He showed out Aunt Phœbe in profound silence.
He watched her retreating form with affectionate respect, stroking his cheek slowly with two fingers.
He closed the door.
He stood as one who seeks to remember.
“Flibber-jib,” he said at last very softly, without exultation or disapproval.
He simply wanted to have it exactly right.
Then he went upstairs to have a long, mild, respectful look at Mr. Grimes, and to ask if he could do anything for him....
§ 8 Aunt Phœbe’s return to The Ingle-Nook blended triumph and perplexity.
“I could never have imagined a man so flimsy,” she said.
“But where are the children?
” asked Aunt Phyllis.
“If all men are like him—then masculine ascendancy is an imposture.
” (“Yes, but where are the children?
”) “So a baulked tigress might feel.
” Aunt Phyllis decided to write to Mr. Sycamore.
§ 9 Mr. Mainwearing was the proprietor of a private school for young gentlemen, not by choice but by reason of the weaknesses of his character.
It was card-playing more than anything else that had made him an educator.
And it was vanity and the want of any sense of proportion that had led to the card-playing.
Mr. Mainwearing’s father had been a severe parent, severe to the pitch of hostility.
He had lost his wife early, and he had taken a grudge against his only son, whose looks he did not like.
He had sent him to Cambridge with a bitter assurance that he would do no good there; had kept him too short of money to be comfortable, spent most of his property—he was a retired tea-broker—in disappointing and embittering jaunts into vice, and died suddenly, leaving—unwillingly, but he had to leave it—about three thousand pounds to his heir.
Young Mainwearing had always been short of pocket-money, and for a time he regarded this legacy as limitless wealth; he flashed from dingy obscurity into splendour, got himself coloured shirts and remarkable ties, sought the acquaintance of horses, slipped down to London for music-halls and “life.
” When it dawned upon him that even three thousand pounds was not a limitless ocean of money, he attempted to maintain its level by winning more from his fellow undergraduates.
Nap and poker were the particular forms of sport he affected.
He reckoned that he was, in a quiet way, rather cleverer than most fellows, and that he would win.
But he was out in his reckoning.
He left Cambridge with a Junior Optime in the Mathematical Tripos and a residuum of about seven hundred pounds.
He was a careful cricketer, and he had liked football at school in his concluding years when he was big enough to barge into the other chaps.
Surveying the prospect before him, he decided that a school was the best place for him, he advertised himself as “of gentlemanly appearance” and “good at games,” and he found his billet in a preparatory school at Brighton.
Thence he went to a big grammar school, and thence came to the High Cross School to remain first as assistant, then as son-in-law and partner, and now as sole proprietor.
Mrs. Mainwearing was not very useful as a helpmeet, as she was slightly but not offensively defective in her mind; still one must take life as one finds it.
She was, at any rate, regular in her habits, and did not interfere with the housekeeper, a worthy, confidence-creating woman, much tipped by the tenderer sort of parent.
Of course Mr. Mainwearing had no special training as a teacher.
He had no ideas about education at all.
He had no social philosophy.
He had never asked why he was alive or what he was up to.
Instinct, perhaps, warned him that the answer might be disagreeable.
Much less did he inquire what his boys were likely to be up to.
And it did not occur to him, it did not occur to any one in those days, to consider that these deficiencies barred him in any way from the preparation of the genteel young for life.
He taught as he had been taught; his teachers had done the same; he was the last link of a long chain of tradition that had perhaps in the beginning had some element of intention in it as to what was to be made of the pupil.
Schools, like religions, tend perpetually to forget what they are for.
High Cross School, like numberless schools in Great Britain in those days, had forgotten completely; it was a mysterious fated routine; the underlying idea seemed to be that boys must go to school as puppies have the mange.
Certain school books existed, God alone knew why, and the classes were taken through them.
It was like reading prayers.
Certain examination boards checked this process in a way that Mr. Mainwearing felt reflected upon his honour, and like all fundamentally dishonest people he was inclined to be touchy about his honour.
But parents wanted examination results and he had to give in.
Preparation for examinations dominated the school; no work was done in the school that did not lead towards an examination paper; if there had been no examinations, no work would have been done at all.
But these examinations might have been worse than they were.
The examiners were experienced teachers and considerate for their kind.
They respected the great routine.
The examiners in classics had, at best, Babu Latin and less Greek, and so they knew quite well how to set a paper that would enable the intelligent candidate to conceal an entire incapacity for reading, writing, or speaking a classical language; the examiners in mathematics knew nothing of practical calculations, and treated the subject as a sort of Patience game; the foreign language examiners stuck loyally to the grammar; in drawing the examiners asked you to copy “copies,” they did not, at any rate, require you to draw things; and altogether the “curse of examinations” might have pressed on Mr. Mainwearing harder than it did.
Suppose the language papers had been just long passages to translate into and out of English, and that the mathematical test had been all problems, and the drawing test had been a test of drawing anything!
What school could have stood the strain?
To assist him in the work of his school Mr. Mainwearing had gathered about him a staff of three.
He had found a young man rather of his own social quality, but very timid, a B. A.
Cantab.
by way of the botanical special; then there was Noakley, a rather older, sly creature, with a large overbalancing nose, who had failed to qualify years ago as an elementary assistant schoolmaster and so had strayed into the uncharted and uncertificated ways of a private school; and finally there was Kahn, an Alsatian, who taught languages and the piano.
With these three and the active assistance of Mrs. Rich, the housekeeper, the school maintained its sluggish routines.
The boys slept in two long rooms that had been made by knocking through partitions in the two upper floors, and converted into dormitories by the simple expedient of crowding them with iron bedsteads and small chests of drawers.
It was the business of Noakley—who had a separate room on the top floor—to arouse the boys at seven with cries and violence for the business of the day.
But there was a tacit understanding between him and the boys not to molest each other until about twenty minutes past.
It was a rule, established by Mr. Mainwearing in a phase of hygienic enthusiasm some years before, that on fine mornings throughout the year the boys should go for a sharp run before breakfast.
It was a modern and impressive thing to do and it cost him nothing.
It was Noakley’s duty to accompany them on this run.
He was unable to imagine any more loathsome duty.
So that he had invented a method of supplementing the rains of heaven by means of a private watering-pot.
His room was directly above Mr. Mainwearing’s, and Mr. Mainwearing slept with his window shut and his blinds down, and about seven-fifteen or so every morning the curious passer-by might have seen a lean, sly man with an enormous nose, his mouth wide open and his tongue out with effort, leaning far out of an upper bedroom of High Cross School and industriously and carefully watering the window and window-sill of the room two storeys below him.
Later, perhaps, a patient observer might have been rewarded by the raising of Mr. Mainwearing’s blind and a glimpse of Mr. Mainwearing, unshaven and in a white cotton nightgown, glancing out at the weather....
So generally the morning began with a tedious, sticky, still sleepy hour called Early Prep.
in the schoolroom on the ground floor.
It was only during Kahn’s alternate week of morning duty that the run ever occurred.
Then it wasn’t a run.
It began as a run and settled down as soon as it was out of sight of the school to a sulky walk and a muttered monologue by Kahn in German—he never spoke any language but German before breakfast—about his “magen.
” Noakley’s method in early prep.
was to sit as near to the fire as possible in the winter and at the high desk in summer, and to leave the boys alone so long as they left him alone.
They conversed in undertones, made and threw paper darts at one another, read forbidden fiction, and so forth.
Breakfast at half-past eight released them, and there was a spell of playground before morning school at half-past nine.
At half-past nine Mr. Mainwearing and Mr. Smithers, the botanical Cantab, appeared in the world, gowned and a little irritable, and prayers and scripture inaugurated the official day.
Mr. Mainwearing’s connexion was a sound Church connexion, and he opened the day with an abbreviated Matins and the collect and lessons for the day.
Then the junior half of the school went upstairs to the second class-room with Mr. Smithers, while Mr. Mainwearing dealt tediously with Chronicles or Kings.
Meanwhile Kahn and Noakley corrected exercise-books in the third class-room, and waited their time to take up their part in the great task of building up the British imperial mind.
By eleven o’clock each of the four class-rooms was thoroughly stuffy and the school was in full swing; Mr. Mainwearing, who could not have translated a new satire by Juvenal to save his life, was “teaching” Greek or Latin or history, Mr. Smithers was setting or explaining exercises on the way to quadratic equations or Euclid Book II.
, which were the culminating points of High Cross mathematics; Kahn, hoarse with loud anger, was making a personal quarrel of the French class; and Noakley was gently setting the feet of the younger boys astray in geography or arithmetic or parsing.
This was the high-water mark of the day’s effort.
After the midday dinner, which was greasy and with much too much potato in it, came a visible decline.
In the afternoon Mr. Mainwearing would start a class upon some sort of exercises, delegate Probyn to keep order, and retire to slumber in his study; Smithers and Kahn, who both suffered from indigestion, would quarrel bitterly with boys they disliked and inflict punishments; Noakley would sleep quietly through a drawing class on the tacit understanding that there was no audible misbehaviour, and that the boys would awaken him if they heard Mr. Mainwearing coming.
Mr. Mainwearing, when he came, usually came viciously.
He would awaken in an evil temper and sit cursing his life for some time before he could rouse himself to a return to duty.
He would suddenly become filled with suspicions, about the behaviour of the boys or the worthiness of his assistants.
He would take his cane and return with a heavy scowl on his face through the archway to his abandoned class.
He would hear a murmur of disorder, a squeak of “cavé!
” and a hush.
Or he would hear Probyn’s loud bellow: “Shut up, young Pyecroft.
Shut it, I say!
—or I’ll report you!
” He would appear threateningly in the doorway.
“What’s he doing, Probyn?
” he would ask.
“What’s he doing?
” “Humbugging about, Sir.
He’s _always_ humbugging about.
” The diffused wrath of Mr. Mainwearing would gather to a focus.
If there were no little beasts like young Pyecroft he wouldn’t be in this infernal, dull, dreary hole of a school.
“_I’ll_ teach you to humbug about, Pyecroft,” he would say.
“Come out, Sir!
” “Please, Sir!
” Roar.
“Don’t _bandy_ words with me, you little Hound!
Come out, I say!
” “Please——!
” Young Pyecroft would come out slowly and weeping.
Mr. Mainwearing would grip him hungrily.
“_I’ll_ teach you to humbug about.
(Cut.
) I’ll teach you!
(Cut.
) I can’t leave this class-room for a moment but half a dozen of you must go turning it upside down.
” (Cut.
) “Wow!
” “Don’t answer _me_, Sir!
