‘I don’t think she’s lazy,’ said Miss Chapman. ‘At least she takes great pains with her lessons at night.’
This was true. Laura tried her utmost, with an industry born of despair. For the comforting assurance of speedy promotion, which she had given Mother, had no root in fact. These early weeks only served to reduce, bit by bit, her belief in her own knowledge. How slender this was, and of how little use to her, in her new state, she did not dare to confess, even to herself. Her disillusionment had begun the day after her arrival, when Dr Pughson, the Headmaster, to whom she had gone to be examined in arithmetic, flung up hands of comical dismay at her befogged attempts to solve the mysteries of long division. An upper class was taking a lesson in Euclid, and in the intervals between her mazy reckonings, she had stolen glances at the master. A tiny little nose was as if squashed flat on his face, above a grotesquely expressive mouth, which displayed every one of a splendid set of teeth. He had small, short-sighted, red-rimmed eyes, and curly hair, which did not stop growing at his ears, but went on curling, closely cropped, down the sides of his face. He taught at the top of his voice, thumped the blackboard with a pointer, was biting at the expense of a pupil who confused the angle BFC with the angle BFG, a moment later to volley forth a broad Irish joke, which convulsed the class. He bewitched Laura; she forgot her sums in the delight of watching him; and this made her learning seem a little scantier than it actually was; for she had to wind up in a great hurry. He pounced down upon her; the class laughed anew at his playful horror; and yet again at the remark that it was evident she had never had many pennies to spend, or she would know better what to do with the figures that represented them. In these words, Laura scented a reference to Mother’s small income, and grew as red as fire.
In the lowest class in the College she sat bottom, for a week or more: what she did know, she knew in such an awkward form that she might as well have known nothing. And after a few efforts to better her condition, she grew cautious, and hesitated discreetly before returning one of those ingenuous answers, which, in the beginning, had made her the merry-andrew of the class. She could, for instance, read a French storybook without skipping very many words; but she had never heard a syllable of the language spoken, and her first attempts at pronunciation caused even Miss Zielinski to sit back in her chair, and laugh till the tears ran down her face. History Laura knew in a vague, pictorial way: she and Pin had enacted many a striking scene in the garden—such as ‘Not Angles but Angels’, or, did the pump-drain overflow, Canute and his silly courtiers—and she also had out-of-the-way scraps of information about the characters of some of the monarchs, or, as the governess had complained, about the state of London at a certain period; but she had never troubled her head with dates. Now they rose before her, a hard, dry, black line, from 1066 onwards, accompanied, not only by the kings who were the cause of them, but by dull laws, and their duller repeals. Her lessons in English alone gave her a mild pleasure; she enjoyed taking a sentence to pieces to see how it was made. She was fond of words, too, for their own sake, and once, when Miss Snodgrass had occasion to use the term ‘eleemosynary’, Laura was so enchanted by it that she sought to share her enthusiasm with her neighbour. This girl, a fat little Jewess, went crimson from trying to stifle her laughter.
‘What is the matter with you girls down there?’ cried Miss Snodgrass. ‘Carrie Isaacs, what are you laughing like that for?’ ‘It’s Laura Rambotham, Miss Snodgrass. She’s so funny,’ spluttered the girl.
‘What are you doing, Laura?’
Laura did not answer. The girl spoke for her.
‘She said—hee, hee!—she said it was blue.’
‘Blue? What’s blue?’ snapped Miss Snodgrass.
‘That word. She said it was so beautiful…and that it was blue.’
‘I didn’t. Grey-blue, I said,’ murmured Laura, her cheeks aflame.
The class rocked; even Miss Snodgrass herself had to join in the laugh, while she hushed and reproved. And sometimes after this, when a particularly long or odd word occurred in the lesson, she would turn to Laura and say jocosely: ‘Now, Laura, come on, tell us, what colour that is. Red and yellow, don’t you think?’
But these were ‘Tom Fool’s colours’; and Laura kept a wise silence.
One day, at geography, the pupils were required to copy the outline of the map of England. Laura, about to begin, found to her dismay that she had lost her pencil. To confess the loss meant one of the hard public rebukes from which she still shrank. And so, while the others drew, heads and backs bent low over their desks, she fidgeted and sought—on her lap, the bench, the floor.
‘What on earth’s the matter?’ asked her neighbour crossly; it was the black-haired boarder who had winked at Laura, the first evening at tea; her name was Bertha Ramsay. ‘I can’t draw a stroke if you shake like that.’
‘I’ve lost my pencil.’
The girl considered Laura for a moment, then pushed the lid from a box of long, beautifully sharpened drawing pencils. ‘Here, you can have one of these.’
Laura eyed the well-filled box admiringly, and modestly selected the shortest pencil. Bertha Ramsay, having finished her map, leaned back in her seat.
‘And next time you feel inclined to boo-hoo at the tea table, hold on to your eyebrows, and sing “Rule Britannia”. Did it want its mummy, poor ’ickle sing?’
Here Bertha’s chum, a girl called Inez, chimed in from the other side.
‘It’s all very well for you,’ she said to Bertha, in a deep, slow voice. ‘You’re a weekly boarder.’
Laura had the wish to be very pleasant, in return for the pencil. So she drew a sigh, and said, with over-emphasis: ‘How nice for your mother to have you home every week!’
Bertha only laughed at this, in a teasing way: ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ But Inez leaned across behind her, and gave Laura a poke.
‘Shut up!’ she telegraphed.
‘Who’s talking down there?’ came the governess’s cry. ‘Here you, the new girl, Laura what’s-your-name, come up to the map.’
A huge map of England had been slung over an easel; Laura was required to take the pointer and to show where Stafford lay. With the long stick in her hand, she stood stupid and confused. In this exigency, it did not help her that she knew, from hearsay, just how England looked: that she could see, in fancy, its ever-green grass, thick hedges, and spreading trees; its never-dry rivers; its hoary old cathedrals; its fogs, and sea mists, and over-populous cities. She stood face to face with the most puzzling map in the world—a map seared and scored with boundary lines, black and bristling with names. She could not have laid her finger on London at this moment, and as for Stafford, it might have been in the moon.
While the class straggled along a verandah at the end of the hour, Inez came up to Laura’s side.
‘I say, you shouldn’t have said that about her mother.’ She nodded mysteriously.
‘Why not?’ asked Laura, and coloured at the thought that she had again, without knowing it, been guilty of a faux pas.
Inez looked round to see that Bertha was not within hearing, then put her lips to Laura’s ear.
‘She drinks.’
Laura gaped incredulous at the girl, her young eyes full of horror. From actual experience, she hardly knew what drunkenness meant; she had hitherto associated it only with the lowest class of Irish agricultural labourer, or with those dreadful white women who lived, by choice, in Chinese camps. That there could exist a mother who drank was unthinkable…outside the bounds of nature.
‘Oh, how awful!’ she gasped, and turned pale with excitement.
Inez could not help giggling at the effect produced by her words—the new girl was a ‘rum stick’, and no mistake—but as Laura’s consternation persisted, she veered about.
‘Oh, well, I don’t know for certain if that’s it. But there’s something awfully queer about her.’
‘Oh, how do you know?’ asked her breathless listener, mastered by a morbid curiosity.
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bsp; ‘I’ve been there—at Vaucluse—from a Saturday till Monday. She came in to lunch, and she only talked to herself not to us. She tried to eat mustard with her pudding, too, and her meat was cut up in little pieces for her. I guess if she’d had a knife, she’d have cut our throats.’
‘Oh!’ was all Laura could get out.
‘I was so frightened, my mother said I shouldn’t go again.’
‘Oh, I hope she won’t ask me. What shall I do if she does?’
‘Look out, here she comes! Don’t say a word. Bertha’s awfully ashamed of it,’ said Inez, and Laura had just time to give a hasty promise.
‘Hullo, you two, what are you gassing about?’ cried Bertha, and dealt out a couple of her rough and friendly punches. ‘I say, who’s on for a race up the garden?’
They raced, all three, with flying plaits and curls, much kicking-up of long, black legs, and a frank display of frills and tuckers. Laura won; for Inez’s wind gave out halfway, and Bertha was heavy of foot. Leaning against the palings, Laura watched the latter come puffing up to join her—Bertha with the shameful secret in the background, of a mother who was not like other mothers.
VIII
Laura had been, for some six weeks or more, a listless and unsuccessful pupil, when, one morning, she received an invitation from Godmother to spend the coming monthly holiday—from Saturday till Monday—at Prahran. The month before, she had been one of the few girls who had nowhere to go; she had been forced to pretend that she liked staying in, did it, in fact, by preference. Now her spirits rose.
Marina, Godmother’s younger daughter, from whom Laura inherited her schoolbooks, was to call for her. By a little after nine o’clock on Saturday morning, Laura had finished her weekly mending, tidied her bedroom, and was ready dressed, even to her gloves. It was a cool, crisp day; and her heart beat high with expectation.
From the dining hall, it was not possible to hear the ringing of the front doorbell; but each time either of the maids entered with a summons, Laura half rose from her chair, sure that her turn had come at last. But it was half-past nine, then ten, then half-past; it struck eleven, the best of the day was passing, and still Marina did not come. Only two girls besides herself remained. Then respectively an aunt and a mother were announced, and these two departed. Laura alone was left: she had to bear the disgrace of Miss Day observing: ‘Well, it looks as if your friends had forgotten all about you, Laura.’
Humiliated beyond measure, Laura had thoughts of tearing off her hat and jacket, and declaring that she felt too ill to go out. But at a quarter to twelve, when she was perfectly sick with suspense, Mary put her tidy head in once more.
‘Miss Rambotham has been called for.’
Laura was on her feet before the words were spoken. She sped to the reception room.
Marina, a short, sleek-haired, soberly dressed girl of about twenty, had Godmother’s brisk, matter-of-fact manner.
She offered Laura her cheek to kiss. ‘Well, I suppose you’re ready now?’
Laura forgave her the past two hours. ‘Yes, quite, thank you,’ she answered.
They went down the asphalted path, and through the garden gate, and turned to walk townwards. For the first time since her arrival, Laura was free again—a prisoner at large. Round them stretched the broad, white streets of East Melbourne; at their side was the thick, exotic greenery of the Fitzroy Gardens; on the brow of the hill rose the massive proportions of the Roman Catholic Cathedral. Laura could have danced, as she walked at Marina’s side.
After a few queries, however, as to how she liked school and how she was getting on with her lessons, Marina fell to contemplating a strip of paper that she held in her hand. Laura gathered that her companion had combined the task of calling for her with a morning’s shopping, and that she had only worked half through her list of commissions before arriving at the College. At the next corner, they got on to the outside car of a cable tramway, and were carried into town. Here Marina entered a co-operative grocery store, where she was going to give an order for a quarter’s supplies. She was her mother’s housekeeper, and had an incredible knowledge of groceries, as well as a severely practical mind: she stuck her fingernail into butter, tasted cheeses off the blade of a knife, ran her hands through currants, nibbled biscuits, discussed brands of burgundy and desiccated soups—Laura meanwhile looking on, from a high, uncomfortable chair, with a somewhat hungry envy. When everything, down to pepper and salt, had been remembered, Marina filled in a cheque, and was just about to turn away, when she recollected an affair of some empty cases, which she wished to send back. Another ten minutes’ parley ensued; she had to see the manager, and was closeted with him in his office, so that by the time they emerged into the street again, a full hour had gone by.
‘Getting hungry?’ she inquired of Laura.
‘A little. But I can wait,’ answered Laura politely.
‘That’s right,’ said Marina, off whose own appetite the edge had no doubt been taken by her various nibblings. ‘Now there’s only the chemist.’
They rode to another street, entered a druggist’s, and the same thing on a smaller scale was repeated, except that here, Marina did no tasting, but for a stray gelatine or jujube. By the time the shop door closed behind them, Laura could almost have eaten liquorice powder. It was two o’clock, and she was faint with hunger.
‘We’ll be home in plenty of time,’ said Marina, consulting a neat watch. ‘Dinner’s not till three today, because of father.’
Again a tramway jerked them forward. Some half-mile from their destination, Marina rose.
‘We’ll get out here. I have to call at the butcher’s.’
At a quarter to three, it was a very white-faced, exhausted little girl that followed her companion into the house.
‘Well, I guess you’ll have a fine healthy appetite for dinner,’ said Marina, as she showed her where to hang up her hat and wash her hands.
Godmother was equally optimistic. From the sofa of the morning room, where she sat knitting, she said: ‘Well, you’ve had a fine morning’s gadding about, I must say! How are you? And how’s your dear mother?’
‘Quite well, thank you.’
Godmother scratched her head with a spare needle and the attention she had had for Laura evaporated.
‘I hope, Marina, you told Graves about those empty jam jars he didn’t take back last time?’
Marina, without lifting her eyes from a letter she was reading, returned: ‘Indeed I didn’t. He made such a rumpus about the sugar boxes that I thought I’d try to sell them to Petersen instead.’
Godmother grunted, but did not question Marina’s decision. ‘And what news have you from your dear mother?’ she asked again, without looking at Laura—just as she never looked at the stocking she held, but always over the top of it.
Here, however, the dinner bell rang, and Laura, spared the task of giving more superfluous information, followed the two ladies to the dining room. The other members of the family were waiting at the table. Godmother’s husband—he was a bank manager—was a morose, black-bearded man, who, for the most part, kept his eyes fixed on his plate. Laura had heard it said that he and Godmother did not get on well together; she supposed this meant that they did not care to talk to each other; for they never exchanged a direct word: if they had to communicate, it was done by means of a third person. There was the elder daughter, Georgina, dumpier and still brusquer than Marina; the eldest son, a bank clerk, who was something of a dandy and did not waste civility on little girls; and lastly there were two boys, slightly younger than Laura, black-haired, pug-nosed, pugnacious little creatures, who stood in awe of their father, and were all the wilder when not under his eye.
Godmother mumbled a blessing; and the soup was eaten in silence.
During the meat course, the bank clerk complained in extreme displeasure of the way the laundress had of late dressed his collars—these were so high that, as Laura was not slow to notice, he had to look straight down the two sides of his nose t
o see his plate—and announced that he would not be home for tea, as he had an appointment to meet some ‘chappies’ at five, and in the evening was going to take a lady friend to Brock’s Fireworks. These particulars were received without comment. As the family plied its pudding spoons, Georgina in her turn made a statement.
‘Joey’s coming to take me driving at four.’
It looked as if this remark too, would founder on the general indifference. Then Marina said warningly, as if recalling her parent’s thoughts: ‘Mother!’
Awakened, Godmother jerked out: ‘Indeed and I hope if you go, you’ll take the boys with you!’
‘Indeed and I don’t see why we should!’
‘Very well, then, you’ll stop at home. If Joey doesn’t choose to come to the point——’ ‘Now hold your tongue, mother!’
‘I’ll do nothing of the sort!’
‘Crikey!’ said the younger boy, Erwin, in a low voice. ‘Joey’s got to take us riding!’
‘If you and Joey can’t get yourselves properly engaged,’ snapped Godmother, ‘then you shan’t go driving without the boys, and that’s the end of it!’
Like dogs barking at one another, thought Laura, listening to the loveless bandying of words—she was unused to the snappishness of the Irish manner, which sounds so much worse than it is meant to be: and she was chilled anew by it when, after dinner, she heard Georgy holding a heated conversation with Joey, through the telephone.
When he came, he was a fat young man, with hanging cheeks, small eyes, and a lazy, lopsided walk.
‘Hello! Here’s a little girl! What’s her name? Say, this kiddy can come along, too.’
As it had leaked out that Marina’s afternoon would be spent between the shelves of her storeroom, preparing for the incoming goods, Laura gratefully accepted the offer.
They drove to Marlborough Tower. With their backs to the horse sat the two boys, mercilessly alert for any display of fondness on the part of the lovers; sat Laura, with her straight, inquisitive black eyes. Hence, Joey and Georgina were silent, since, except to declare their feelings, they had nothing to say to each other.
The Getting of Wisdom Page 8
