South Riding Read online

  “You’re not really such a philosopher, I bet,” he smiled at her. “I don’t believe you naturally let ill alone.”

  “Good Lord, no. But after you’ve been teaching for nearly twenty years, you learn to accept some of nature’s limitations.”

  The party at the lower table was enjoying itself. Mrs. Brimsley, the widow, had not had an evening in Kiplington for years. They were teasing her now about Bill Heyer. Joe saw Miss Burton listening with interest, her red head cocked, her face quizzical. She observed his attention.

  “Who are they?”

  He told her.

  “I’ve driven round the colony. Three or four of our girls come from there. A grim place.”

  “Yes—a socialist experiment carried out by people who don’t believe in socialism.”

  “Poor devils. Look here—are you on the Higher Education Committee?”

  Joe shook his head.

  “A pity. I’d like to do a bit of lobbying. Have you seen my buildings? How would you like to run a school with a basement full of black beetles?”

  He laughed.

  “It’s all very well to laugh; but they get into our shoes. I have to pretend I don’t mind and that the girls are idiots to be scared, but I’m simply terrified. I dream of them at nights. Can’t you do anything? You’re an alderman.”

  “Have you seen our council?”

  “It seems to me that you hardly need to see it. Tell me—is there really any hope from any of them? They can’t all be as reactionary as they seem.”

  “They’re not. We have a few fellows with imagination.”

  He was thinking of Snaith and the clever work he had done with the new motor road to Kiplington. Get that through, and the Waste Housing Scheme was as good as adopted.

  He began to explain to Miss Burton just why it was so important.

  “It should affect you and your school too. At present this place is a dead end—the waste-paper basket of the South Riding, people have called it. They come here after they’ve failed in Kingsport or Hardascliffe because the rates are low and the air’s good and nobody keeps up an appearance. But—you wait . . . I’m not really an enthusiast about local government, but you do at least get solid concrete results— swimming baths, sewage farms.” He smiled bitterly. “You begin by thinking in terms of world-revolution and end by learning to be pleased with a sewage farm.”

  The voices from the table below rose clearly.

  “We’ll get Carne down to the Club. We’ll ask him for a lead. If Snaith thinks he can twist the Council round his finger, we’ll teach him there’s some one still works for our interests.”

  “It’ll have to be after Christmas then,” said Mrs. Brimsley. “There’s the Children’s Concert, and then the W.I. play, and then the Christmas parties.”

  “Will that be time enough? We don’t want to wake up one morning and find the road laid and the Wastes drained and all our traffic lost, while we dance round Christmas trees.”

  “Nay—they won’t start work till after Christmas. Scheme’s got to be approved by Ministry of Transport,” said the more easy-going Heyer.

  The interval was over. The tables were being swept away again, the Jazz Octette returned. The four colonists moved their chairs against the wall. They were not dancers.

  “What has Carne to do with this?” asked Sarah Burton.

  “Oh, he’ll fight the new road, I expect.”

  “Why should he?”

  “Because he’s a gentleman farmer—survival of the feudal system. Because he hates Snaith and does everything he can to block his programmes. Because whenever we propose anything for Kiplington and Kingsport, he drags up his fifty or so colonists. They’re all ex-service men. Old Comrades of the Great War.”

  Sarah’s sharp green eyes read his. She nodded.

  Another black mark against Carne of Maythorpe. She knew now—through Mr. Tadman who told Mrs. Tadman who told Cissy who told Miss Parsons who had told Sarah, that Carne alone among the governors had opposed her appointment to the High School. He had done well. She was against him.

  I know his type, she thought—aristocrats, conservatives, vindicators of tradition against experiment, of instinct against reason, of piety against progress. They were pleasant people, kind, gracious, attractive. They cultivated a warm human relationship between master and servant. They meant well. And they did evil.

  She said as much to Astell.

  “You know the story of the difference between the North and South Americans and their attitude towards the negroes? The Southerner says: ‘You’re a slave, God bless you’; the Northerner: ‘You’re a free man, damn you!’ I remember how a man I used to know in South Africa said he loved the natives. He was an Afrikaans farmer who believed in flogging blacks for breach of the Masters and Servants Act.”

  “Of course—you were in Africa too.”

  “I hate this feudal love in which there’s no give and take. ‘I love the ladies.’ ‘I love my labourers.’ Love needs the stiffening of respect, the give and take of equality.”

  She flushed. She was thinking of Ben and his attitude towards women, of Van Raalt and a hot night in Cape Province, when she stood among the orange and lemon blossom with violets at her feet, a night made for love and beauty and kisses, and she had wasted it arguing passionately about the colour in question. She had broken with Van Raalt and determined to take a new post in Australia. Her South African dreams had exploded in a burst of anger. Her mother’s illness had intervened; she had forgiven her puzzled lover long ago. But she still resented the sacrifice of so sweet a night.

  She looked at the scene below her.

  It seemed to her that the evening had melted into a triple fugue. There was the carnival—pierrots and butterflies, gipsies and Quaker girls flowed out again across the floor. The saxophone wailed its dirge—the closing song of 1932.

  “No more money in the bank;

  No cute baby here to spank.

  What’s to do about it?

  Let’s turn out the lights an’ go to bed.”

  Dancing, weaving the mazes of their formless unpatterned pattern, they forgot the empty boarding-houses along the esplanade, the stagnant shops, the hunger of uncertainty. They were no longer typists and accountants and engineers and market gardeners. They belonged to a pageant without design; they moved to a rhythm without reason—“What’s to do about it?”—dancing their way towards 1933.

  A little above them sat the four older people from Cold Harbour, more experienced, wary, conscious, planning what it was that they would do about it. They would persuade Carne to oppose the Skerrow-Kiplington Road Scheme. They would obstruct progress. Their movements had a pattern— drawn according to what they thought was their local interest and others’ civic duty.

  And higher still among the palms and dignatories sat Authority. Astell, Sarah—planning a new order of government, planning dignity, planning beauty, planning enlightenment.

  She turned to Astell, a little amused at the conceit and solemnity of her vision.

  “You’ll have to help me. I’m lost in the quicksands of local politics. And Carne’s one of my governors. What’s to do about it?”

  She hummed her tune.

  “In the long run,” said Astell solemnly, “he can’t stop us. But the undertone of reaction is always strong.”

  He had almost forgotten how to talk to a woman, but he was so grateful for her vitality, so glad of her congenial indiscretions, that his face, stiffened by pain and loneliness, learned new expressions of mobility with which to smile at her. Sarah, thinking that in Carne she had acquired a new enemy, felt confident that in Alderman Astell she had found a friend.

  5

  Lydia Holly Goes Home

  “JILL JACKSON, six out of ten. Neat, careful work, but you don’t seem able to use your own mind, much, do you, Jill?”

  Miss Masters was handing back English Literature essays to Form IV Upper and found in most of its members a lamentable lack of enthusiasm for Shakespeare�
��s descriptive powers. They were “doing” A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Gladys Hubbard—careless and dull and much too short. I don’t believe you try, Gladys. If you don’t do better next time I shall make you take it home and copy it out on Saturday as a Refused Lesson.”

  Gladys Hubbard, secure in her fame and confidence, marched up to the staff desk, her ringlets tossing unrepentently. She was singing at Leeds in the Christmas holidays. She had put away childish things.

  “Lydia Holly.”

  Lydia stood up, a humpish stocky schoolgirl, her brown hair hanging in a neglected bob round her high-coloured, good-humoured face. There was a great hole in her stocking. Her tunic, acquired second-hand by Mrs. Holly, strained to bursting point across her mature young breasts.

  Miss Masters contemplated her and sighed.

  No flicker on Lydia’s stolid face revealed the tumult of her emotion. It never occurred to the English mistress that the criticism of Lydia’s essays marked the summit of a mounting excitement almost too high to be endured.

  “Lydia, when I look at your exercise books, I groan in spirit. I can’t think what you do with them. Look at this.” She held up a stained and blotted page. She sniffed at it. “Did you eat fish and chips all over it? I thought so. Oh, it was only chips, was it? Well, then they must have been quite near the fish and caught a fishy flavour. It’s a terrible looking book. I can’t think how you ever got a Scholarship. Twenty-six spelling mistakes. No punctuation. Five blots, and seventeen crossings out. I can’t possibly accept such work. Of course it’s refused.”

  The blank horror invading Lydia’s soul failed to reflect itself in the wooden face. Lydia was trained to meet catastrophe; but this blow to her vanity was appalling. Perhaps Miss Masters realised something of this, or perhaps, being a nice, fresh, eager girl, she simply preferred pleasant to unpleasant words. Her blonde, pretty face changed. She smiled at Lydia.

  “At the same time, it’s much the most interesting piece of work I’ve had sent in from this form—this term—indeed, it’s really one of the most interesting school essays I’ve read. Lydia chose as her subject—‘The landscape round Athens as Shakespeare imagined it, compared with any other rural landscape with which you are familiar,’ and she knows her South Riding. She has observed and she can describe. And she’s studied Shakespeare. So that when you’ve overcome the terrible appearance of this work, it’s a joy to read. You’ve got imagination, Lydia, of course, but you’ve got sense too. So, although it’s refused as an exercise—because we can’t do with such slovenly, dirty work—when you’ve copied it out— without a single blot or spelling mistake—I shall send it up to the head mistress as a possible entry for the essay prize. Do you understand?”

  “Ooh. Yes, Miss. Thank you, Miss.”

  “Miss Masters. Not plain Miss. And for goodness’ sake, during break, ask Miss Parsons for some wool and mend that stocking. How can I think about A Midsummer Night’s Dream when every time I look up I’m confronted by that terrible potato!”

  All the girls laughed. Lydia laughed. She was in Heaven.

  For she was clever. It had not been a lie then, that ecstasy which visited her when she read A Midsummer Night’s Dream on top of the railway coach last summer. It had meant something. She had understood something. She was drunk with an intoxicating wine of gladness.

  Oh, she would copy her essay, perfectly, perfectly . . . Miss Burton was to see it—Miss Burton, the deity who ruled this Olympus. Miss Becker, the games mistress, was jolly, even if she discouraged Lydia from doing the splits and called her dancing vulgar; Miss Parsons, the matron, who presided over school dinners, wasn’t a bad old bitch; Miss Masters was grand and ever so clever and pretty; even old Siggs made a good butt to tease, so had her uses. But Miss Burton, red-haired, imperious, unexpected, adorable, with her swift ferocity and her sudden kindness, to her Lydia’s heart paid its deepest allegiance.

  “I am your spaniel; and, Miss Sarah Burton

  The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.”

  Miss Burton punished her for swearing, derided her singing, despised Madame Hubbard’s choice of entertainment, scolded her for untidiness, lashed her careless work with ridicule, but she filled to the brim Lydia’s cup of bliss.

  “Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,

  Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,

  Unworthy as I am, to follow you.”

  Once when Sarah was asked—“How do you deal with Schwärmerei in your school?” she had replied serenely, “I control them all by monopoly and then absorb them. It’s quite simple. We needs must love the highest when we see it. I take good care to be the highest in my school.” She knew well enough what had befallen Lydia Holly; but she reckoned that it would do the girl little harm.

  Lydia delighted her. The girl’s roughness, her ability, her exuberance, were qualities desired by Sarah for her children. You could make something out of a girl like that. She had power. It was for such as her that the Kiplington High School of Sarah’s dreams should be constructed. The conversation with Alderman Astell had confirmed her ambition. The projected road from Kingsport, the subsequent development of the town, were steps towards the education of Lydia Holly.

  Lydia, during break, plunged to the dark underground cloakroom three steps at a time. What she saw there stirred her to action without impinging upon her deep-seated satisfaction.

  “Hi! Midge Carne. What are you doing in my pigeon hole? Get out. Them’s my gym shoes. Cheek!”

  “Cheek yourself. D’you think I want your filthy gym shoes?”

  “Who says they’re filthy? Sneak thief. Get off and drink your milk—milk-baby!”

  To Lydia such brief exchanges of courtesy meant no more than brushing a fly off her breakfast margarine. At the Shacks, controversy was voluble and unrestrained. But Midge Carne, Lord Sedgmire’s granddaughter, took it far more seriously.

  She had been poking about the cloakroom out of curiosity. In her lonely life she had seen so little of other people that all their ways fascinated and puzzled her. To be caught exploring was horror enough, flooding her with shame, for the habit was as dark and unsurmountable as secret drinking. But to be caught by Lydia Holly, a fat vulgar girl from the Shacks, lowest of the low; to be accused of stealing; to be scolded by a village child—it was unthinkable.

  “How dare you? How dare you?” she screamed, inartieulate with rage, dancing up and down.

  “Midge! Be quiet. Lydia, what does this mean?”

  Miss Burton stood in the cloakroom doorway.

  “She said I was a sneak thief! A milk-baby!” sobbed Midge, white and shaken.

  “I don’t want to hear what she said. Neither of you had any business to be talking in the cloakroom at all. You know there’s a rule of silence here—and the rule is made precisely because, as you see, you apparently can’t be trusted to behave like civilised human beings. Midge, go and wash your face. Lydia, hadn’t you better darn that hole in your stocking?”

  “But she said . . .”

  “Be quiet, Midge. What she said is of no interest to me. Put your things tidy, both of you. Midge, don’t be such a crybaby. Run to Miss Parsons. Oughtn’t you to be having milk and biscuits? You must learn to take life more calmly.”

  Miss Burton waited until Midge had darted away to hide her shame and tears in the beetle-haunted lavatory—a safe and private refuge in time of trouble. Then she turned to Lydia.

  “Lydia, you must be careful. Don’t take advantage of your quick tongue. Midge is a delicate proud little creature, and rather hysterical. She hasn’t had your luck to be brought up rough, in a big family. She’ll have to learn but you might let her down gently. You’ve got imagination. Use it to discriminate between people.”

  Ah, that was like Miss Burton, thought Lydia, worshipping dumbly, to take the sting out of a scolding with a compliment.

  Miss Burton went on.

  “And now, for goodness’ sake, try to tidy yourself. Go to that mirror and look at your hands, y
our hair, your stocking. To be so untidy isn’t clever. It’s just undisciplined. And if you’re going to get that university scholarship you’ll need every ounce of discipline you can manufacture for yourself.”

  Now, how did she know I mean to go to college? Lydia asked herself, scrubbing her cheeks with harsh carbolic soap, staring at her ragged brown hair in the small square mirror.

  She knows. She thinks I can do it She means me to go. Oh, there is none like her, none. She’s glorious. She’s perfect. Even her scolding was a delight.

  “I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again:

  Mine ear is much enamoured of thy note.”

  Pale and still shuddering with sobs, Midge emerged from her retreat. Lydia’s heart was filled with love and compassion towards the whole world. Cheerfully she ignored the rule of silence.

  “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