Miss Pym Disposes

by Josephine Tey

  "You can subtract my five minutes from that, my dear," said Dakers, licking a protuberant piece of butter-icing into safety with an expert tongue. "I've spent the whole afternoon doing the cortex of the brain, and the only result is a firm conviction that I personally haven't got a cortex."

  "You must have a cortex," said Campbell, the literal-minded Scot, in a Glasgow drawl like syrup sliding from a spoon. But no one took any notice of this contribution to the obvious.

  "Personally," said O'Donnell, "I think the vilest part of physiology are the villi. Imagine drawing cross-sections of something that has seven different parts and is less than a twentieth of an inch high!"

  "But do you have to know the human structure in such detail?" asked Lucy.

  "On Tuesday morning we do," said the Thomas who slept. "After that we can forget it for the rest of our lives."

  Lucy, remembering the Monday morning visit to the gymnasium which she had promised herself, wondered if physical work ceased during Final Examinations week. Oh, no, they assured her. Not with the Dem. only a fortnight ahead. The Demonstration, she was given to understand, ranked only a short head behind Final Examinations as a hazard.

  "All our parents come," said one of the Disciples, "and—"

  "The parents of all of us, she means," put in a fellow Disciple.

  "—and people from rival colleges, and all the—"

  "And the civic swells of Larborough," put in a third. It seemed that when one Disciple burst into speech the others followed automatically.

  "And all the County big-wigs," finished the fourth.

  "It's murder," said the first, summing it up for them.

  "I like the Dem," said Rouse. And again that odd silence fell.

  Not inimical. Merely detached. Their eyes went to her, and came away again, expressionlcssly. No one commented on what she had said. Their indifference left her marooned in the moment.

  "I think it's fun to show people what we can do," she added, a hint of defence in her tone.

  They let that pass too. Never before had Lucy met that negative English silence in its full perfection; in its full cruelty. Her own edges began to curl up in sympathy.

  But Rouse was less easily shrivelled. She was eyeing the plates before her, and putting out her hand for something to eat. "Is there any tea left in the pot?" she asked.

  Nash bent forward to the big brown pot, and Stewart took up the talk from where the Disciples had left it.

  "What really is murder is waiting to see what you pull out of the Post lottery."

  "Post?" said Lucy. "You mean jobs? But why a lottery? You know what you apply for, surely?"

  "Very few of %us need to apply," Nash explained, pouring very black tea. "There are usually enough applications from schools to go round. Places that have had Leys gymnasts before just write to Miss Hodge when they have a vacancy and ask her to recommend someone. If it happens to be a very senior or responsible post, she may offer it to some Old Student who wants a change. But normally the vacancies are filled from Leaving Students."

  "And a very fine bargain they get," said a Disciple.

  "No one works so hard as a First-Poster does," said a second.

  "For less money," supplemented a third.

  "Or with a better grace," said a fourth.

  "So you see," Stewart said, "the most agonising moment of the whole term is when you are summoned to Miss Hodge's room and told what your fate is going to be."

  "Or when your train is pulling out of Larborough and you haven't been summoned at all!" suggested Thomas, who evidently had had visions of being engulfed, jobless, by her native mountains again.

  Nash sat back on her heels and smiled at Lucy. "It is not nearly as grim as it sounds. Quite a few of us are provided for already and so are not in the competition at all. Hasselt, for instance, is going back to South Africa to work there. And the Disciples en masse have chosen medical work."

  "We are going to start a clinic in Manchester," explained one.

  "A very rheumaticky place."

  "Full of deformities."

  "And brass"—supplemented the other three automatically.

  Nash smiled benevolently on them. "And I am going back to my old school as Games Coach. And the Nut—and Desterro, of course, doesn't want a post. So there aren't so many of us to find places for."

  "I won't even be qualified if I don't go back to the liver pretty soon," Thomas said, her beady brown eyes blinking in the sun. "What a way to spend a summer evening."

  They shifted their positions lazily, as if in protest, and fell to chatter again. But the reminder pricked them, and one by one they began to gather up their belongings and depart, trailing slowly across the sunlit grass like disconsolate children. Until presently Lucy found herself alone with the smell of the roses, and the murmur of insects, and the hot shimmer of the sunlit garden.

  For half an hour she sat, in great beatitude, watching the slow shadow of the tree creep out from her feet. Then Desterro came back from Larborough; strolling slowly by the drive with a Rue de la Paix elegance that was odd after Lucy's hour of tumbled youth at tea. She saw Miss Pym, and changed her direction.

  "Well," she said, "did you have a profitable afternoon?"

  "I wasn't looking for profit," said Lucy, faintly tart. "It was one of the happiest afternoons I have ever spent."

  The Nut Tart stood contemplating her.

  "I think you are a very nice person," she said irrelevantly, and moved away, leisurely, to the house.

  And Lucy suddenly felt very young, and didn't like the feeling at all. How dared a chit in a flowered frock make her feel inexperienced and foolish!

  She rose abruptly and went to find Henrietta and be reminded that she was Lucy Pym, who had written The Book, and lectured to learned societies, and had her name in Who's Who, and was a recognised authority on the working of the Human Mind.

  "What is the college crime?" she asked Henrietta, as they went upstairs after supper. They had paused by the big fan-lighted window on the landing to look down on the little quadrangle, letting the others precede them up to the drawing-room.

  "Using the gymnasium as a short cut to the field-path," Henrietta said promptly.

  "No, I mean real crime."

  Henrietta turned to look at her sharply. After a moment she said: "My dear Lucy, when a human being works as hard as these girls do, it has neither the spare interest to devise a crime nor the energy to undertake it. What made you think of that subject?"

  "Something someone said at tea this afternoon. About their 'only crime.' It was something to do with being perpetually hungry."

  "Oh, that!" Henrietta's brow cleared. "Food pilfering. Yes, we do now and then have that. In any community of this size there is always someone whose power of resisting temptation is small."

  "Food from the kitchen, you mean?"

  "No, food from the students' own rooms. It is a Junior crime, and usually disappears spontaneously. It is not a sign of vice, you know. Merely of a weak will. A student who would not dream of taking money or a trinket can't resist a piece of cake. Especially if it is sweet cake. They use up so much energy that their bodies are crying out for sugar; and though there is no limit to what they may eat at table they are forever hungry."

  "Yes, they do work very hard. What proportion of any one set finishes the course, would you say?"

  "Of this lot"—Henrietta nodded down to where a group of Seniors were strolling out across the courtyard to the lawn—"eighty per cent are finishing. That is about average. Those who fall by the wayside do it in their first term, or perhaps their second."

  "But not all, surely. There must be accidents in a life like this."

  "Oh, yes, there are accidents." Henrietta turned and began to climb the further flight.

  "That girl whose, place Teresa Desterro took, was it an accident that overtook her?"

  "No," said Henrietta shortly, 'she had a breakdown."

  Lucy, climbing the shallow steps in the wake of her friend's bro
ad beam, recognised the tone. It was the tone in which Henrietta, the head-girl, used to say: "And see that no galoshes are left lying about the cloakroom floor." It did not permit of further discussion.

  Henrietta, it was to be understood, did not like to think of her beloved College as a Moloch. College was a bright gateway to the future for deserving youth; and if one or two found the gateway a hazard rather than an opening, then it was unfortunate but no reflection on the builders of the gateway.

  "Like a convent," Nash had said yesterday morning. "No time to think of an outside world." That was true. She had watched a day's routine go by. She had also seen the Students' two daily papers lying unopened in the common-room last night as they went in to supper. But a nunnery, if it was a narrow world, was also a placid one. Uncompetitive. Assured. There was nothing of the nunnery about this over-anxious, wildly strenuous life. Only the self-absorption was the same; the narrowness.

  And yet was it so narrow, she wondered, considering the gathering in the drawing-room? If this were any other kind of college that gathering would have •been homogeneous. If it were a college of science the gathering would consist of scientists; if it were a college of divinity, of theologians. But in this long charming room, with its good "pieces" and its chintzes, with its tall windows pushed up so that the warm evening flowed in through them full of grass and roses, in this one room many worlds met. Madame Lefevre, reclining in thin elegance on a hard Empire sofa and smoking a yellow cigarette in a green holder, represented a world theatrical; a world of grease-paint, art, and artifice. Miss Lux, sitting upright in a hard chair, represented the academical world; the world of universities, text-books, and discussion. Young Miss Wragg, busy pouring out coffee, was the world of sport; a physical, competitive, unthinking world. And the evening's guest Dr Enid Knight, one of the "visiting" Staff, stood for the medical world. The foreign world was not present: Sigrid Gustavsen had retired with her mother, who spoke no English, to her own room where they could chatter together in Swedish.

  All these worlds had gone to make the finished article that was a Leaving Student; it was at least not the training that was narrow.

  "And what do you think of our students, Miss Pym, now that you have had a whole afternoon with them?" Madame Lefevre asked, turning the battery of her enormous dark eyes on Lucy.

  A dam-silly question, thought Lucy; and wondered how a good respectable middle-class English couple had produced anything so like the original serpent as Madame Lefevre. "I think," she said, glad to be able to be honest, "that there is not one of them who is not an advertisement for Leys." And she saw Henrietta's heavy face light up. College was Henrietta's world. She lived and moved and had her being in the affairs of Leys; it was her father, mother, lover, and child.

  "They are a nice lot," agreed Doreen Wragg happily, not yet far removed from her own student days and regarding her pupils with camaraderie.

  "They are as the beasts that perish," said Miss Lux incisively. "They think that Botticelli is a variety of spaghetti." She inspected with deep gloom the coffee that Miss Wragg handed to her. "If it comes to that, they don't know what spaghetti is. It's not long since Dakers stood up in the middle of a Dietetic lecture and accused me of destroying her illusions."

  "It surprises me to know that anything about Miss Dakers is destructible," observed Madame Lefevre, in her brown velvet drawl.

  "What illusion had you destroyed?" the young doctor asked from the window-seat.

  "I had just informed them that spaghetti and its relations were made from a paste of flour. That shattered forever, apparently, Dakers' picture of Italy."

  "How had she pictured it?"

  "Fields of waving macaroni, so she said."

  Henrietta turned from putting two lumps of sugar in a very small cup of coffee (How nice, thought Lucy wistfully, to have a figure like a sack of flour and not to mind!) and said: "At least they are free from crime."

  "Crime?" they said, puzzled. "Miss Pym has just been enquiring about the incidence of crime at Leys. That is what it is to be a psychologist."

  Before Lucy could-protest against this version of her simple search for knowledge, Madame Lefevre said: "Well, let us oblige her. Let us turn out the rag-bag of our shameful past. What crime have we had?"

  "Farthing was had up last Christmas term for riding her bike without lights," volunteered Miss Wragg.

  "Crime," said Madame Lefevre. "Crime. Not petty misdemeanours."

  "If you mean a plain wrong-un, there was that dreadful creature who was man-crazy and used to spend Saturday evenings hanging round the barrack-«ate in Larborough."

  "Yes," said Miss Lux, remembering. "What became of her when we tossed her out, does anyone know?"

  "She is doing the catering at a Seamen Refuge in Plymouth," Henrietta said, and opened her eyes when • they laughed. "I don't know what is funny about that. The only real crime we have had in ten years, as you very well know, was the watches affair. And even that," she added, jealous for her beloved institution, "was a fixation, of course."

  "By precedent, I suppose she is now with the Goldsmiths and Silversmiths," said Madame Lefevre.

  "I don't know," said Henrietta, seriously. "I think her people kept her at home. They were quite well-to-do."

  "Well, Miss Pym, the incidence appears to be point-something per cent." Madame Lefevre waved a thin brown hand. "We are an unsensational crowd."

  "Too normal by half," Miss Wragg volunteered. "A little spot of scandal would be nice now and again. A nice change from hand-stands and upward circlings."

  "I should like to see some hand-stands and upward-circlings," Lucy said. "Would it be all right if 1 Came and watched the Seniors tomorrow morning?"

  But of course she must see the Seniors, Henrietta said. They were busy with their Demonstration programme, so it would be a private Demonstration all for herself. "They are one of the best sets we ever had," she said.

  "Can I have first go of the gym, when the Seniors are doing their Final Phys, on Tuesday?" Miss Wragg asked; and they began to discuss time-tables.

  Miss Pym moved over to the window-seat and joined Dr Knight.

  "Are you responsible for the cross-section of something called the villi?" she asked.

  "Oh, no; physiology is an ordinary college subject: Catherine Lux takes that."

  "Then what do you lecture on?"

  "Oh, different things at different stages. Public Health. The so-called 'social' diseases. The even more so-called Facts of Life. Your subject."

  -"Psychology?"

  "Yes. Public Health is my job, but psychology is my specialty. I liked your book so much. So common-sensical. I admired that. It is so easy to be high-falutin about an abstract subject."

  Lucy flushed a little. There is no praise so gratifying as that of a colleague.

  "And of course I am the College medical advisor," Dr Knight went on, looking amused. "A sinecure if ever there was one. They are a disgustingly healthy crowd."

  "But—" Lucy began. It is the outsider, Desterro (she was thinking), who insists on their abnormality. If it is true, then surely this trained observer, also from the outside, must be aware of it.

  "They have accidents, of course," the doctor said, misunderstanding Lucy's "but." "Their life is a long series of minor accidents—bruises, and sprains, and dislocated fingers, and what not—but it is very rarely that anything serious happens. Bentley has been the only instance in my time—the girl whose room you have. She broke a leg, and won't be back till next term."

  "But—it is a strenuous training, a gruelling life; do they never break down under it?"

  "Yes. That's not unknown. The last term is particularly trying. A concentration of horrors from the student's point of view. Crit, classes, and—"

  "Crit, classes?"

  "Yes. They each have to take a gym, and a dancing class in the presence of the united Staff and their own set, and are judged according to the show they make. Nerve-shattering. These are all over, the crit, classes; but there
are still the Finals, and the Demonstration, and being given jobs, and the actual parting from student life, and what not. Yes, it is a strain for them, poor dears. But they are amazingly resilient. No one who wasn't would have survived so long. Let me get you some more coffee. I'm going to have some."

  She took Lucy's cup and went away to the table; and Lucy leaned back in the folds of the curtain and looked at the garden. The sun had set, and the outlines were growing blurred; there was the first hint of dew in the soft air that blew up against her face. Somewhere on the other side of the house (in the students' common-room?) a piano was being played and a girl was singing. It was a charming voice: effortless and pure, without professional tricks and without fashionable dealing in quarter-tones. The song, moreover, was a ballad; old-fashioned and sentimental, but devoid of self-pity and posing. A frank young voice and a frank old song. It shocked Lucy to realise how long it was since she had heard any voice raised in song that was not a product of valves and batteries. In London at this moment the exhausted air was loud with radios; but here, in this cool, scented garden, a girl was singing for the love of it.

  I have been too long in London, she thought; I must have a change. Find a hotel on the South Coast, perhaps. Or go abroad. One forgets that the world is young.

  "Who is singing?" she asked, as her cup was handed to her again.

  "Stewart, I think," Dr Knight said, not interested. "Miss Pym, you can save my life if you like to."

  Lucy said that to save a doctor's life would give her immense satisfaction.

  "I want to go to a medical conference in London," Dr Knight said in a conspiratorial undertone. "It is on Thursday, but that is the day of my psychology lecture. Miss Hodge thinks I am forever going to conferences, so I can't possibly beg off again. But if you were to take that lecture for me, everything would be grand."