South Riding Page 9

  She lit one cigarette from another, pressing out the stub with slender brown-stained fingers, on which Philip’s moonstone glowed romantically.

  “I see that Miss Sigglesthwaite had five periods with IIIa and seven with V Upper, but none at all with the Lower Fourth last term,” observed Sarah.

  The two women sat together preparing time-tables in a bare distempered office as attractive as the average station waiting-room. It was a fortnight before the opening day of term.

  “She can’t manage the Fourths,” said Dolores. “She’s quite hopeless. The usual Jonah. Not bad enough to be given the boot, and she’ll never resign because she’s at the top of the scale and no other place would take her.”

  “I see. She can’t manage the Fourths, so these children only start science in the Fifths and their matriculation results are deplorable.” Sarah, who was tired and disliked her second mistress, sounded particularly brisk. “What’s your solution to the problem, Miss Jameson?”

  “Well, I don’t know that you can exactly do anything,” said Dolores, who under Miss Holmes had proposed one identical solution for all problems during the past ten years. “What I always say is—the really important thing is to equip these girls for life. And most of them will go into shops, or become nursemaids, or help their mothers run lodging houses till they marry. So really, as long as they’ve been to the High School and can count as High School girls, I don’t see it matters so much what they do here. Speaking honestly as a woman, if you know what I mean.”

  Sarah knew what she meant. She looked with disfavour at the sallow, elegant, lackadaisical classics mistress and wished heartily for the promotion of Philip Parkhurst. Poor Philip. Ten years if a day younger than his intended bride, and a poor little pip-squeak at best; but anything was good enough to relieve the High School of those Spanish combs stuck into greasy hair, those trodden-down pin-point heels, that complexion with blackheads blocking neglected pores. Whatever Miss Sigglesthwaite is like, thought Sarah, she can’t be much worse than our Dolores.

  “Sixty if she’s a day. Calls herself forty-seven, of course. They’re all forty-seven when they get past fifty,” the classics mistress continued. “She knits her own jumpers, and dances into form with a great band of cotton camisole showing above her skirt, chirruping, ‘Girls, Girls. Would you believe it? The little chiff-chaff’s back again!’”

  Miss Jameson was a cruel and clever mimic. She made Sarah see Miss Sigglesthwaite’s absurdity and guileless ineffectiveness. She did not know that she also made Sarah see her second mistress’s own vapid heartlessness.

  Sarah changed the subject coldly. Whatever she wished to know about Miss Sigglesthwaite she preferred to learn without Miss Jameson’s intervention.

  She doesn’t wash enough, thought Sarah cattily. Perhaps that’s her Spanish ancestry.

  She turned her attention to the problem of the appalling buildings and showed Miss Jameson a letter she had written to the Chairman of Governors.

  “I don’t really mind a hall the size of a cupboard, a pitch dark cellar-gymnasium and laboratories housed in a broken-down conservatory; but these beetle-hunted cloakrooms I will not have. They’re enough to constipate any child for months. I will have those altered.”

  “What a hope you’ve got. You don’t know Colonel Collier.”

  “Why is he Chairman of Governors if he’s not interested in education?”

  “Oh, he is interested. He’s interested in seeing that the children of the working classes aren’t educated above their station.”

  “I see.”

  “Oh, and by the way, Mrs. Beddows called while you were at Kingsport this morning to talk about the Carne child.”

  “What about her, and why should Mrs. Beddows come?”

  It was exasperating to be dependent on Miss Jameson’s ten years’ knowledge of the town. Once term had started, Sarah vowed that she would be free of her.

  Dolories lit another cigarette and leaned back to enjoy herself. She explained Carne—a local farmer who had ruined himself by running away with the daughter of a West Country nobleman.

  “A born snob. These gentlemen farmers are. He went for blue blood and found it tainted. Serve him right, I say. They say the kid’s probably not his, but the mother’s in an asylum and the child’s mental as anything. We shall have to have her, of course. He’s a governor. So’s Mrs. Beddows. Deputy God, we call her. General undertaker. Divorces arranged, relatives buried, invalids nursed, municipalities run free, gratis and for nothing. All for the love of interference. You must have seen them both when you came up to be interviewed.”

  “I remember Mrs. Beddows.”

  Miss Jameson noted the omission. Wishes to suggest she didn’t see Carne. Probably a man-hater, she concluded. Her thoughts veered.

  “Look here, I must rush now. The boy friend said he would call for me at seven pip emma, and it’s half-past now.”

  To be martyred would be beyond Miss Jameson’s dignity, but she could be breezily self-righteous.

  Sarah hailed her departure.

  If she’s a specimen of my staff, she thought, Heaven help me. Yet she was not depressed by the prospect before her. The greater her isolation, the greater her glory of achievement.

  She had already achieved something. By bullying the porter, slave-driving cleaners, snubbing Dolores, importuning the governors, she had reduced to some state approaching cleanliness the wretched buildings under her control. She had rented a cottage for herself on the Central Promenade, between the plebeian North and superior South sides. She had bought a second-hand car, explored the neighbourhood, and taken measure of her own position.

  It was not strong, but it had, she felt, possibilities.

  She rose, tidied her desk to its habitual order, and cast critical eyes round the unprepossessing office. She would alter that, if she paid for it herself. Her imagination introduced a carpet, Medici prints, hand woven curtains.

  She yawned. She powdered her nose. She combed, with vigour, the crackling electric tangle of her hair. She put on her hat. She reached her coat from the cupboard.

  She was tired, but her day’s work was not yet over. There lay on her desk a sheet of brimstone-coloured paper, cheaply printed.

  “GRAND GALA EVENING”

  it proclaimed.

  A CONCERT in the Floral Hall

  to be given by

  MADAME HUBBARD

  and her very Highly Talented Pupils.

  Première Danseuse—Madame Gordon.

  Solos by the Renowned Child Vocalist, Miss Gladys

  Hubbard (Gold Medallist at Leeds, Blackpool, London,

  Manchester and York.)

  The Kiplington Memorial Subscription Band.

  At the Piano, Madame Hubbard.

  Lovely Scenic Effects.

  Gorgeous Costumes.

  A Feast of Fun and Beauty.

  In Aid of the Kiplington Kiddies Holiday Home.

  Tickets 1s., 6d. and 3d. Book Early

  .

  J. Astell, Printer.

  Sarah had booked early. She was not interested in the Kiddies Holiday Home, but she was very much interested in Madame Hubbard. She expected the worst of the Fun and Beauty; but she had not been a week in Kiplington before she realised that Madame Hubbard was a power. Gladys, her daughter, was a High School girl; half her contemporaries were among Madame Hubbard’s highly talented pupils. Whatever happened at those dancing and singing classes, which appeared to be the chief centre of Kiplington social life during the long winters when no visitors came and the bleak winds swept the Esplanade Gardens, Sarah would have to reckon with it.

  She found her car and drove to the Floral Hall.

  The long barn-like auditorium was not more than half full. A handful of visitors augmented the local audience, which was, Sarah observed, almost identical with the congregation in the chapel. Here were the same shapeless middle-aged women with bodies like sacks and broken discoloured teeth, the same limp spectacled girls, the same elderly men pro
pping pendulous stomachs uncomfortably on the narrow wooden benches. But here also were a few local Bloods sprinkled among their sober elders, and three rows of giggling, tittering, sweet-munching adolescent girls, the raw material, Sarah presumed, from which she must build her great public school.

  It would not be easy.

  She had just taken her place when the Kiplington Memorial Subscription Band broke into the first brays of its Classical Overture.

  Eleven honest citizens, sweating like bullocks in tight scarlet uniforms, blew brassy triumphant noises through their instruments. Their leader, seated in the middle, raised with one hand a cornet to his lips, and in the other waved an ivory knitting needle.

  Two ladies behind Sarah were discussing precisely why he should have left his baton at Spunlington after the Cricket Dance. So clear were their tones, so scurrilous their insinuations, that it was a few moments before Sarah realised fully the obstacles against which the band were scrambling. For the conductor obeyed all too literally the proverbial mandate. His right hand rarely knew what his left hand did, so that as the Classical Overture proceeded, his knitting needle might be beckoning the bandsmen on to the Toreador’s Song from Carmen before his cornet blew the last notes of the Pilgrim’s Hymn from Tannhauser. When, after a fantastically warbled variation of “La donna é mobile,” the whole band burst simultaneously into the Soldier’s Chorus from Faust, Sarah could hardly forbear to cheer this triumph of co-operation over individualism. Before the overture ended, her sporting instincts had overcome fatigue and disapproval and she wanted to rise in her seat and applaud the wild chase of trumpet, trombone, flute and bugle after the fugitive cornet. Even while she clapped the hysterical Coda, choking with excitement as the trombone tripped, stumbled, recovered and wound up with a superb flourish only half a tone flat, the tinned-salmon coloured curtains parted, a fat little lady in green lace sidled round them to the piano in the right-hand corner above the footlights, and the massed tableau of Madame Hubbard’s pupils confronted her.

  She drew a long breath, clasped her hands in her lap, and prepared to endure.

  For there they stood, those vulgar, nasty, tiresome young women, exposing knock knees, bow legs, skinny or opulent thighs, beneath frills of coloured gauze, pink, white and yellow. Their arms and necks were bare, their faces painted, their hair waved or frizzed or corkscrewed into ringlets. The row nearest the footlights consisted of small children, but beyond them, rising in tiers till they reached the Premiere Danseuse and her adult assistants, posed and ogled forty to fifty girls of all ages and complexions.

  The lady in green lace struck a chord on the piano.

  Madame Hubbard’s pupils burst into song.

  “Hurraye! Hurraye! Hurraye!”

  shrilled their piercing, tuneless but mercilessly clear articulation.

  “We welcome you to-day!

  Oh, we are so glad to meet you,

  See how cheerfully we greet you!

  We shall do our best to please you,

  Soothe you, cheer you, love you, tease you.

  Some of us are rather haughty—”

  A row of older girls stepped forward and turned sideways, hands on hips, lips curled in a pantomime of hauteur.

  “Some of us are rather naughty!”

  There place was taken by a line of minxes, lifting abbreviated skirts, winking sophisticated eyes with so vivid an imitation of music-hall naughtiness that Sarah gasped.

  “Never mind old Mrs. Grundy!

  We have jokes for all and sundry.

  And we hope before you go,

  You’ll have found you like—our—Show!”

  The word Show was squealed on a wavering approximation to High A, and held there by the perspiring chorus till it melted into the pure sweet treble of Miss Gladys Hubbard.

  She walked from the wings, her pretty ringlets bound with scarlet poppies, her poppy-coloured frill of a skirt revealing naked dimpled thighs, her dark eyes rolling, her ringed fingers gesticulating with refined affectation. Behind her trotted a troupe of poppy-clad babies in scarlet crinkled paper, who clustered round her as she halted in the centre of the stage, to sing with immense self-confidence the second verse of the Song of Welcome.

  “Fling away your cares and troubles,

  All life’s worries are but bubbles,

  There’s no sense in looking blue!

  See what wrinkles do for you!

  Dance like us, your griefs beguiling.

  Soon you too will be a’smiling.

  We’ve a cure for every ill.

  You can learn it If—You—Will.”

  The babies were too young to have learned the tricks displayed by Madame Hubbard’s older pupils. With solemn eyes they stared into the footlights or waved at friends and neighbours in the audience. With lovely rounded limbs they conscientiously followed their leader’s gestures, pointing when she pointed, stamping when she stamped, bowing when she bowed. Sometimes they got into each other’s way and sensibly changed their positions. They’re too good for this: it’s a shame! Sarah protested to herself, angry and indignant that this vulgarity was the best that Kiplington could offer to such delicious youth, such bold innocence.

  Gladys Hubbard’s voice was an exquisite natural instrument. Every artifice of vulgarity failed to ruin it. The girl shrugged and tossed her ringlets, squirmed and warbled, but the notes of her odious song glittered like a cascade of jewels, a fountain of pellucid music, sparkling, perfect.

  Her successors shared her affectations without her talent. They sang songs about spooning, moonlight, triplets, ripe cheese, honeymoons and inebriation. Sarah watched in a turmoil of emotion. She did not know whether most to loathe or admire the draper’s indefatigable wife, who had obviously taken such pains to teach the children these tricks far better unlearned.

  For the children were disciplined; they were word-perfect; they pronounced in flat Yorkshire voices with shrill precision the fatuous words of song and dialogue; they performed their tricks and pirouettes without an error. Whatever Madame Hubbard’s pupils might be, thought Sarah, it was evident that they had a highly talented teacher.

  She moaned in spirit.

  If she could have employed Madame Hubbard instead of— say—Miss Sigglesthwaite. . . .

  The final turn before the interval was announced:

  “A Humorous Duet—By Jeanette and Lydia.”

  On to the stage waltzed two big well-grown girls, one dressed as a man in a morning-suit and topper, the other a “lady” in blue satin and tulle, bare to the waist behind, split to the thigh, revealing a jewelled garter between tulle frills. They began to shout and mime, for neither had any pretensions to tunefulness, a song of which the refrain ran thus:

  “I’ve had my eye on yon

  A long, long time.

  I’ve sighed my sigh for you

  A long, long time.

  You know I’d die for you, I dunno why I do,

  But ’less I die

  I’ll soon have my—

  More than my eye

  On you—a long, long time.”

  The words were idiotic, but seemed innocent enough, the gestures accompanying them were not. The dance was as frankly indecent as anything that Sarah had seen on an English stage. The girl taking the female part “shimmied” her well-formed breasts and stomach, leered and kicked, evoking whistles, shouts and cat-calls from the delighted young men in the audience. Her partner, after a robust and rabelaisian mimicry of courtship, ended her performance with a series of cartwheels across the stage, culminating in the splits; from which uncomfortable attitude she raised her hat and kissed her hand as the curtain fell. Sarah felt sick.

  She had had enough. She had seen Madame Hubbard’s pupils. She would go home. She was preparing to rise when she saw the band return and stuff itself into the inadequate accommodation provided for it. The fat lady in the torn red cardigan beside her sighed, a long explosive sigh of satisfaction.

  “Don’t they do it lovely?” she asked complacently.


  “They’re very well trained.”

  Sarah groped for her glove.

  “That was our Jennie in the last bit.”

  “Oh: which?”

  “The one in the blue dress. She’s been two years with Mrs. Hubbard. Sings and dances lovely. She wants to go on the films. She was on the short list in the Kingsport Beauty Competition last year. They say she might have been queen if she was a bit stouter. The gentlemen were judging and I always say—never mind the fashions. A gentleman likes something to get hold of. She won’t eat potatoes, but I tell her all skin and grief never got anywhere. Her pa’s dead set against the pictures. But I say, a girl might do worse. They say it’s a hard life for a girl, but I used to get eight shillings a week as help to Mrs. Biggs—up and down them big houses on the front with the lodgers sleeping three in a bed, and sand in the basin and early morning tea and babies. Then since I married I’ve took visitors myself, and nine kiddies—six living—and him out of work as often as not, and my leg bad. I’d as soon be kicking in the chorus as standing all day at the washtub, leave alone the life of sin they talk about. You’re not married yourself, are you?”