South Riding Read online

  From time to time the obligation came to her, challenging her to perform terrific devoirs. It might be to catch at a bough as the trap span under it, to lean far out from a window to touch a sprig of ivy, to climb across the central rafter in the high barn, dizzily straddling far above the stone-paved floor. But for three years now a central challenge confronted her— reserved for some crisis when all other resources failed.

  She had had a dream.

  In her dream she was playing with her mother’s things, dressed up in a black velvet coat and a great plumed hat, parading, when suddenly terror had come upon her.

  Her terrors, like her tempers, descended without warning out of calm and safety, sending her screaming, frenzied, towards the kitchen, the dining-room, wherever were lights and fires and grown-up people. But from this dream terror she had not fled. Instead, she had turned to God, kneeling down, dressed as she was in velvet and lace and feathers, beside the ottoman where the furs were kept at the foot of her mother’s bed, and she had prayed while dusk fell and the room grew darker until through her latticed fingers she saw the door from her father’s dressing-room open slowly, slowly, revealing—what?

  She never knew. The scream with which she awoke dispelled that knowledge.

  But she had been aware, ever since, with relentless certainty, that one day she would have to put herself to the test.

  This was the way out. This was what They demanded. Thus alone could she serve her father, restore her mother, and bring back to Maythorpe its legendary happiness, when the silver polo cups on the sideboard winked and glittered, and men drank deep after a long day’s hunting, toasting her mother the bride, the brave, the beautiful, lifting their glasses, tossing them, emptied, to splinter on the wainscot, when the lawns were clipped like velvet below the feet of sauntering silk-shod ladies, and the bedrooms were lit by firelight, and there was hot water in all the muffled cans, and scented soap upon the wash-stands.

  Oh, Midge knew, from Cook, and Hicks and Castle, what Maythorpe Hall had been in its glory.

  Trembling, her pulses thumping, her eyes brilliant with fear and resolution, she opened the wardrobe, starting at every creak of the door.

  There hung the velvet jacket, its swaggering skirts spread like a highwayman’s, its collar high, its cuffs and lacy jabot. She wrapped the skirt around her; she buttoned the jacket above her cotton overall; she arranged the yellowing lace, the braid, the pockets. From its tissue paper she took the immense black picture hat and set it sideways on her tumbled elf-locks. Her mouse-coloured hair hung each side of her pointed, resolute face.

  She must do this thing. She must face her destiny. To this hour had pointed the nods, the nudges, the sentences broken off, the stories curtailed at her appearance. All the fragmentary enlightenment about doom and flight and darkness, her “poor,” “ill-fated” or “unfortunate” mother, the Maythorpe tragedy, her father’s “trouble,” led to this awful, inevitable moment.

  Her stumbling figure passed the wardrobe mirror. She started from her own grotesque reflection. She fell on her knees beside the ottoman, facing the dressing-room door. Her hat lurched sideways, heavy, weighted with feathers. She pressed her hands against her staring eyeballs.

  “Our Father, which art in Heaven . . .”

  She began slowly and firmly.

  Through her fingers she watched the green unearthly twilight, the bed, the mirror. Her mounting panic urged her on, louder and louder, till at a gallop she took the “Power and the Glory, for Ever and Ever, Amen,” and plunged straight into, “Please God bless Father and Mother and make Mother well and bring her back again. . . .”

  Her eyes were still open, yet she saw no longer anything but the slanting mirror. Her voice rang out, shrill and frantic, drowning all other noises. She was no longer conscious of what she said, “and bring her back again, for Christ’s sake, for Christ’s sake, for Christ’s sake.”

  The door was opening. Like doom it swung towards her. In the mirror she saw what in her dreams she had not seen—the tall black figure, the blazing ball of a face.

  “For Christ’s sake! For Christ’s sake! For Christ’s sake!” she screamed, on her feet, beating away from her in maniacal horror her father who stood, seeing his wife, in 1918, frenzied, in her gallant highwayman’s costume, beating him off in the outburst of hysteria with which she accompanied her announcement that she was going to bear his child.

  2

  Kiplington Governors Appoint a New

  Head Mistress

  THE GOVERNORS of Kiplington Girls’ High School had already interviewed Miss Torrence, Miss Slaker, Miss Hammond and Miss Dry, from out of five short-listed applicants for the post of head mistress; and they liked none of them.

  It was true that the appointment was not much to offer. The school owed its independent existence to masculine pride rather than to educational necessity. Thirty years earlier the County Council decided that a daily train journey to Kingsport, suitable enough to Grammar School boys, was unsafe for girls. Girls were delicate. Life imperilled them. So four grim tall apartment houses were bought cheap on Kiplington North Cliff, facing the Pidsea Buttock road; walls were knocked down; dining-rooms became classrooms; a separate building housed the thirteen boarders, and there for a quarter of a century the High School mouldered gently into unregretted inefficiency under the lethargic rule of the retiring Miss Holmes. Miss Holmes had done well enough. Miss Holmes was amiable. It was a pity that age and health persuaded her to go now and share a semi-detached villa in Bournemouth with her widowed sister. Another Miss Holmes was what the chairman hoped for.

  The Reverend Milward Peckover, however, was financially compelled to send his own daughters to the High School. Three nice, good, clever girls they were; and he cherished ambitions for their future. They might even do what he had never done—win scholarships to Oxford and the Sorbonne, like Chloe Beddows, the one star pupil whom the High School had quite failed to discourage. He had good reason for desiring a more effective successor to Miss Holmes, and until he saw her, he had canvassed his fellow governors avidly in favour of the highly-qualified but personally unprepossessing Miss Dry. But, having seen her, he was out of love with her, and his second choice had been given to the still uninterviewed Miss Sarah Burton, whose testimonials both public and private were almost suspiciously favourable. He sat back restlessly listening to Mr. Tadman’s idiotic remarks about a little more accommodation for the Buttocks.

  There were Pidsea Buttock and Ledsea Buttock, and Mr. Peckover recognised the ancient and honourable nomenclature of the villages. He particularly detested the puerile vulgarity of persons who would make jokes about them, suspecting Mr. Tadman of a wish to shock the clergy when, being a Nonconformist, he rolled the words round his tongue and proclaimed with a sort of sensuous relish, “the Buttocks this,” “the Buttocks that,” “with regard, Mr. Chairman, to that bit of unpleasantness about the Buttocks.” And the worst of it was that, whenever Mr. Tadman started, some nervous affection contracted the muscles of Mr. Peckover’s nose and throat; his eyes pricked; before he could collect his defences, he began to giggle.

  He turned to the chairman, driven to action.

  “Mr. Chairman, I see we have another candidate, Sarah Burton. A good plain name. Let’s hope,” (snigger, snigger, snigger; but the explosion was now respectably justified)—”let us hope a good plain woman.”

  Dr. Dale, the Congregational Minister, pulled forward the typed papers containing Miss Burton’s particulars.

  “Yes, she is an Oxford woman,” he said, preparing to be impressive. He was a Cambridge man and a Doctor of Divinity —two qualifications which made him a thorn in the side of Mr. Peckover, who was a Manchester B.A. and Lichfield.

  “Only a post graduate course. B.Litt, after graduating at Leeds,” corrected Mr. Peckover. “Then she had—ah— Empire experience—South Africa. Well, well. That should broaden the mind a little. Broaden the mind.”

  Mr. Peckover had himself spent a year with the Railway M
ission in Canada, and was a great believer in the psychological influence of the great open spaces—especially those within the British Empire.

  The chairman, a vague though ferocious little man, grunted that, whatever she was, Miss Burton must be seen.

  The clerk summoned her.

  Miss Sarah Burton, M.A., B.Litt., entered the unwelcoming ugly room.

  She was much too small. Though her close-fitting hat was blamelessly discreet, her hair was red—not mildly ginger but vivid, springing, wiry, glowing, almost crimson, red. Astonishing hair. Nothing could have been more sober and business-like than her dark brown clothes; but from her sensible walking shoes rose ankles which were superfluously pretty. Head mistresses, ran the unformed thought in the mind of more than one governor, should not possess ankles as slender as a gazelle’s and flexible arched insteps.

  On the other hand, her face was not pretty at all, the nose too large, the mouth too wide; the small, quick, intelligent eyes were light and green.

  “But she looks healthy,” thought Alderman Mrs. Beddows. “Good skin. Good teeth. And she wasn’t born yesterday.”

  Miss Burton had been born, according to her official papers, thirty-nine years ago.

  “Er—er—Miss Burton.” The chairman frowned and stuttered, wrinkling his face. “Won’t you sit down?”

  She sat, as she moved and spoke, with deliberation. She placed her formidable leather bag on the table before her. Then she looked round at the governors and she smiled.

  Her smile was not in the least like those of the other candidates, nervous, ingratiating, chilling or complacent. It was a smile friendly yet challenging. Well, gentlemen, here I am. What next?

  “Miss, Miss—er—Burton,” began the chairman. “You’ve been teaching in—er—London.”

  He pronounced “London” as though it were an obscure village of whose name he was uncertain.

  “At the South London United Secondary School for Girls,” replied Miss Burton. There was hardly a trace of North Country inflection in her pleasant, unexpectedly contralto voice. “I have been there for eight years, the last three of which I was second mistress.”

  The chairman had never heard of the South London United. Dr. Dale had. “That’s a very famous centre of education,” he said. “A large school, I believe.”

  “Too large. We have seven hundred and forty pupils now.”

  “I wonder why you should want to leave it and come to our little town?” smiled the Congregationalist minister.

  “Soapy Sam! Our little town indeed!” snorted Mr. Peckover to himself.

  “I wanted to come back to Yorkshire.”

  “Indeed. Indeed,” sniffed the chairman. “A Yorkshire woman, ha?”

  Mrs. Beddows leant forward. “May I ask Miss Burton a question, Mr. Chairman? Miss Burton, we had a much better appointment in the South Riding last winter at Flintonbridge. You didn’t apply for that, I think?”

  The candidate faced the alderman with a smile that was not wholly ingenuous. “I didn’t think I should get it,” she replied.

  “Indeed?”

  The chairman removed, polished, and replaced his pince-nez; the Rev. Mr. Dale, Mr. Drew and Mr. Tadman stared at her. Mr. Peckover beamed benignly upon this candidate for headmistress-ship who actually answered questions frankly. The only person, Sarah Burton noted, who appeared entirely indifferent to her, was a large dark sullen man sunk into his chair next Mrs. Beddows. She gathered all eyes but his and held them.

  “You see,” she said, with the engaging gesture of one who puts all her cards on the table, “I am very small, and not by birth a lady. My hair is red and I do not look like the sort of person whom most governors want to see reading reports at Speech Day. At the same time . . .”

  It was the alderman who saw how, by pleading her smallness, her femininity, she had evoked some masculine sentiment of protective chivalry in the breasts of the other governors. Mrs. Beddows was moved differently.

  “Yes, I see,” she said—kindly but with the air of one who stands no nonsense. “Your head mistress at South London gives you quite remarkable testimonials.”

  “She was far too generous,” admitted Miss Burton, as well aware as Mrs. Beddows that head mistresses sometimes give glowing references to subordinates whom they desire to see elsewhere. “She’s taught me almost everything I know; but she understands why I want to come north again, and she sympathises with my wish to have a school of my own.”

  “Of your own?”

  Miss Burton accepted the challenge. “Of which I was the head,” she replied.

  “I see.” Mr. Peckover had been waiting with his question. The governors knew that the only thing to be done with their chairman was to take all initiative out of his hands. “I see that you have had overseas experience.”

  “Yes. I taught for a little while in a Transvaal High School, and then in a native mission college in the Cape. I meant to go on to Australia, but family reasons brought me back to England.”

  “Has—er—any other—governor any questions?” asked the chairman.

  Mrs. Beddows had.

  “Now then, Miss Burton, you’ve had a very interesting life and met very interesting people. I wonder if you know just what you’ll be in for, in a little out-of-the-way town like this? Some people call Kiplington the last town in England, though of course we don’t think so. But it’s no use pretending it’s the hub of the universe. The children here are mostly daughters of small tradesmen and lodging-house keepers, with just a few professional people and clergy. The buildings are not up to much, and I don’t see, with the country in the way it is, that they’ll soon be put right. Now, the point is, can you throw yourself into the kind of work you’ll have to face here? Because if you can’t, it’s not much use your coming. Do you realise, I wonder, how very different it’ll be from what you’re used to?”

  Miss Burton shook her head, smiling.

  “Less different perhaps than you think. I come from these parts.” As she said, “these parts,” her voice thickened, as though the thought of Kiplington recalled a forgotten dialect.

  “Indeed, indeed,” barked the chairman, “and where was that, pray?”

  Again it was to Mrs. Beddows that Miss Burton turned.

  “Do you remember the blacksmith’s shop at Lipton-Hunter?” she asked.

  “Why—yes.”

  “Do you remember a red-haired blacksmith there, about forty years ago, who married the district nurse?”

  “Why—yes—of course, yes. Let me see. . . . Didn’t the husband . . .?” Then she remembered.

  Coming home more drunk than usual one Saturday night, the blacksmith had fallen face downwards into the shallow water-butt in his yard used for cooling irons. His wife, accustomed to his straying from more paths than those of strict sobriety, had not even sought him until the Monday morning. Soon after the inquest, the wife had left the district, taking her children with her.

  “They were my parents,” said Miss Burton quietly. “My mother went into the West Riding. She got work there through the kindness of the schoolmaster in Lipton-Hunter. He was splendid to us. It was through him really that I got scholarships later on to Barnsley High School, and then to Leeds and Oxford. I came back from South Africa when my mother’s health failed. She died five years ago.”

  “She was a very fine woman,” said Mrs. Beddows. “I remember.”

  The governors livened up after that. They asked Miss Burton questions about Yorkshire and teaching methods and social theories; but nothing really interested them half so much as the fact that she had lived at Lipton-Hunter.

  Mr. Dale nodded and smiled. She has worked her way up, he thought, even as I did. A good girl.

  Mr. Peckover thought of Miss Burton’s scholarships and his daughters’ future. What she had done, they might do.

  The chairman, fumbling with his tongue for a bit of gristle caught in a hollow tooth, thought, “Let them get on with it. A blacksmith’s daughter. Good enough for Kiplington.”

/>   Tadman thought, “Like Mrs. Beddows’ darn cheek to talk about small tradesmen’s daughters. What else is she herself but a pig-killing smallholder’s daughter? All the same, this Miss Burton looks a bit of all right. Got some go in her. She’s seen a thing or two outside the four walls of a school. Let’s have her. She may knock a bit of sense into Cissie.”

  Mr. Briggs, the solicitor, thought, “She looks like a business woman. If she’s a business woman, we shall get on all right. Miss Holmes never answered her letters. By Jove, Carne looks hard hit. Did he mind not being alderman as much as all that? Or can he be ill?” That unexpected possibility led him to make a quick memo on the paper generously provided for other purposes by the Higher Education Committee. “Carne. Will? See Fretton. Overdraft.”

  Mr. Drew felt suspicious. Everything about Miss Burton appeared quite proper, quite decent. Propriety and decency were the virtues which he primarily demanded in all women. Yet. Yet——

  He watched Tadman. Tadman was a grocer, a business man, and, in a small cheerful way, a speculator in real estate. Drew, as an estate agent, needed Tadman’s friendship. Kiplington was not such a prosperous place that an estate agent could ignore personal influence. He had decided to vote for Tadman’s candidate.

  Alderman Mrs. Beddows had made up her mind. Sarah Burton’s brilliant testimonials and neat business-like appearance represented, she considered, a tribute to her own perspicacity. Thirty years ago she had declared the widowed district nurse of Lipton-Hunter to be a fine woman, and here was her daughter who had developed against all odds into a candidate for headmistress-ship. Didn’t that just show she had good breeding in her somewhere?