In one of the rows of desks for two—blackened, ink-scored, dusty desks, with eternally dry inkwells—sat Laura and Tilly, behind them, Inez and Bertha. The cheeks of the four were flushed. But, while the others only whispered and wondered, Laura was on the tiptoe of expectation. She could not get her breath properly, and her hands and feet were cold. Twisting her fingers in and out, she moistened her lips with her tongue. When, oh, when would it begin?
These few foregoing minutes were the most trying of any. For when, in an ominous hush, Mr Strachey strode to his desk, Laura suddenly grew calm, and could take note of everything that passed.
The Principal raised his hand, to enjoin a silence that was already absolute.
‘Will Miss Johns stand up!’
At these words, spoken in a low, impressive tone, Bertha burst into tears and hid her face in her handkerchief. Hundreds of eyes sought the unhappy culprit as she rose, then were cast down, and remained glued to the floor.
The girl stood, pale and silly-looking, and stared at Mr Strachey, much as a rabbit stares at the snake that is about to eat it. She was a very ugly girl of fourteen, with a pasty face, and lank hair that dangled to her shoulders. Her mouth had fallen half open through fear, and she did not shut it all the time she was on view.
Laura could not take her eyes off the scene: they travelled, burning with curiosity, from Annie Johns to Mr Strachey, and back again to the miserable thief. When, after a few introductory remarks on crime in general, the Principal passed on to the present case, and described it in detail, Laura was fascinated by his oratory, and gazed full at him. He made it all live vividly before her; she hung on his lips, appreciating his points, the skilful way in which he worked up his climaxes. But then, she herself knew what it was to be poor—as Annie Johns had been. She understood what it would mean to lack your tram fare, on a rainy morning—according to Mr Strachey, this was the motor-origin of the thefts—because a lolly shop had stretched out its octopus arms after you. She could imagine, too, with a shiver, how easy it would be, the loss of the first pennies having remained undiscovered, to go on to threepenny bits, and from these to sixpences. More particularly since the money had been taken, without exception, from pockets in which there was plenty. Not, Laura felt sure, in order to avoid detection, as Mr Strachey supposed, but because to those who had so much a few odd coins could not matter. She wondered if everyone else agreed with him on this point. How did the teachers feel about it?— and she ran her eyes over the row, to learn their opinions from their faces. But these were as stolid as ever. Only good old Chapman, she thought, looked a little sorry, and Miss Zielinski—yes, Miss Zielinski was crying! This discovery thrilled Laura—just as, at the play, the fact of one spectator being moved to tears intensifies his neighbour’s enjoyment. But when Mr Strachey left the field of personal narration and went on to the moral aspects of the affair, Laura ceased to be gripped by him, and turned anew to study the pale, dogged face of the accused, though she had to crane her neck to do it. Before such a stony mask as this, she was driven to imagine what must be going on behind it; and while thus engrossed, she felt her arm angrily tweaked. It was Tilly.
‘You are a beast to stare like that!’
‘I’m not staring.’
She turned her eyes away at once, more than half believing her own words; and then, for some seconds, she tried to do what was expected of her: to feel a decent unconcern. At her back, Bertha’s purry crying went steadily on. What on earth did she cry for! She had certainly not heard a word Mr Strachey said. Laura fidgeted in her seat, and stole a side-glance at Tilly’s profile. She could not, really could not, miss the last scene of all, when, in masterly fashion, the Principal was gathering the threads together. And so, feeling rather like a ‘Peeping Tom’, she cautiously raised her eyes again, and this time managed to use them without turning her head.
All other eyes were still charitably lowered. Several girls were crying now, but without a sound. And, as the last, awful moments drew near, even Bertha was hushed, and of all the odd hundreds of throats, not one dared to cough. Laura’s heart began to palpitate, for she felt the approach of the final climax, Mr Strachey’s periods growing ever slower and more massive.
When, after a burst of eloquence, which, the child felt, would not have shamed a Bishop, the Principal drew himself up to his full height, and, with uplifted arm, thundered forth: ‘Herewith, Miss Annie Johns, I publicly expel you from the school! Leave it, now, this moment, and never darken its doors again!’—when this happened, Laura was shot through by an ecstatic quiver, such as she had felt once only in her life before; and that was when a beautiful, golden-haired Hamlet, who had held a Ballarat theatre entranced for a whole evening, fell dead by Laertes’ sword, to the rousing plaudits of the house. Breathing unevenly, she watched, lynx-eyed, every inch of Annie Johns’ progress: watched her pick up her books, edge out of her seat and sidle through the rows of desks; watched her walk to the door, with short, jerky movements, mount the two steps that led to it, fumble with the handle, turn it, and vanish from sight; and when it was all over, and there was nothing more to see, she fell back in her seat with an audible sigh.
It was too late after this for the winding of the snaky line about the streets and parks of East Melbourne, which constituted the boarders’ daily exercise. They were dispatched to stretch their legs in the garden. Here, as they walked round lawns and tennis courts, they discussed the main event of the afternoon, and were a little more vociferous than usual, in an attempt to shake off the remembrance of a very unpleasant half-hour.
‘I bet you Sandy rather enjoyed kicking up that shindy!’
‘Did you see Puggy’s boots again? Girls, he must take twelves!’
‘And that old blubber of a Ziely’s handkerchief! It was filthy. I told you yesterday I was sure she never washed her neck.’
Bertha, whose tears had dried as rapidly as seaspray, gave Laura a dig in the ribs. ‘What’s up with you, old Tweedledum? You’re as glum as a lubra!’
‘No, I’m not!’
‘It’s my belief Laura was sorry for that pig,’ threw in Tilly.
‘Indeed I wasn’t!’ said Laura indignantly.
‘Sorry for a thief!’
‘I tell you I wasn’t!’—and this was true. Among the divers feelings Laura had experienced that afternoon, pity had not been included.
‘If you want to be chums with such a mangy beast as that, you’d better go to school in a lock-up!’
‘I don’t know what my father’d say, if he knew I’d been in the same class as a pickpocket,’ said the daughter of a minister from Brisbane. ‘I guess he wouldn’t have let me stop here a week.’
Laura went one better. ‘My mother wouldn’t have let me stop a day.’
Those standing by laughed, and a girl from the Riverina said: ‘Oh no, of course not!’ in a tone that made Laura wince, and regret her readiness.
Before tea, she had to practise. The piano stood in an outside classroom, where no one could hear whether she was diligent or idle, and she soon gave up playing and went to the window. Here, having dusted the gritty sill with her petticoat, she leaned her chin on her two palms and stared out into the sun-baked garden. It was empty now, and very still. The streets that lay behind the high palings were deserted, in the drowsy heat; the only sound to be heard was a gentle tinkling to vespers in the neighbouring Catholic Seminary. Leaning thus on her elbows, and balancing herself, first on her heels, then on her toes. Laura went on, in desultory fashion, with the thoughts that had been set in motion during the afternoon. She wondered where Annie Johns was at the present moment, and what she was doing; wondered how she had faced her mother, and what her father had said to her. All the rest of them had gone back at once to their everyday life; Annie Johns alone was cut adrift. What would happen to her now? Would she perhaps be turned out of doors?…into the streets?—and Laura had a lively vision of the guilty creature, in rags and tatters, slinking along walls and sleeping under bridges, eternally moved
on by a ruthless London policeman (her only knowledge of extreme destitution being derived from the woeful tale of ‘Little Jo’). And to think that the beginning of it all had been the want of a trumpery tram fare! How safe the other girls were! No wonder they could allow themselves to feel shocked and outraged; none of them knew what it was not to have threepence in your pocket. While she, Laura… Yes, and it must be this same incriminating acquaintance with poverty that made her feel differently about Annie Johns and what she had done. For her feelings had been different—there was no denying that. Did she now think back over the half-hour spent in Number One, and act honest Injun with herself, she had to admit that her companions’ indignant and horrified aversion to the crime had not been hers, let alone their decent indifference towards the criminal. No, to be candid, she had been deeply interested in the whole affair, had even managed to extract an unseemly amount of entertainment from it. And that, of course, should not have been. It was partly Mr Strachey’s fault, for making it so dramatic; but, nonetheless, she genuinely despised herself for having such a queer inside.
‘Pig—pig—pig!’ she muttered under her breath, and wrinkled her nose in a grimace.
The real reason of her pleasurable absorption was, she supposed, that she had understood Annie Johns’ motive better than anyone else. Well, she had had no business to understand— that was the long and the short of it: nice-minded girls found such a thing impossible, and turned incuriously away. And her companions had been quick to recognise her difference of attitude, or they would never have dared to accuse her of sympathy with the thief, or to doubt her chorusing assertion with a sneer. For them, the gap was not very wide between understanding and doing likewise. And they were certainly right. Oh, the last wish in the world she had, was to range herself on the side of the sinner; she longed to see eye to eye with her comrades—if she had only known how to do it. For there was no saying where it might lead you, if you persisted in having odd and peculiar notions; you might even end by being wicked yourself. Let her take a lesson in time from Annie’s fate. For, beginning perhaps with ideas that were no more unlike those of her schoolfellows than were Laura’s own, she was now a branded thief and an outcast. And the child’s feelings, as she stood at the window, were not very far removed from prayer. Had they found words, they would have taken the form of an entreaty that she might be preserved from having thoughts that were different from other people’s; that she might be made to feel as she ought to feel, in a proper, ladylike way, and especially did she see a companion convicted of crime.
Below all this, in subconscious depths, a chord of fear seemed to have been struck in her as well—the fear of stony faces, drooped lids, and stretched, pointing fingers. For, that night, she started up with a cry from dreaming that not Annie Johns, but she was being expelled; that an army of spear-like first fingers was marching towards her, and that, try as she would, she could not get her limp, heavy legs to bear her to the school-room door.
And this dream often returned.
XIII
On her honourable promotion the following Christmas—she mounted two forms this time—Laura was a thin, middle-sized girl of thirteen, who still did not look her age. The curls had vanished. In their place hung a long, dark plait, which she bound by choice with a red ribbon.
Tilly was the only one of her intimates who skipped a class with her; hence, she was thrown more exclusively than before on Tilly’s companionship; for it was a melancholy fact: if you were not in the same class as the girl who was your friend, your interests and hers were soon fatally sundered. On their former companions, Tilly and Laura, from their new perch, could not but look down: the two had masters now for all subjects; Euclid loomed large; Latin was no longer bounded by the First Principia; and they fussed considerably, in the others’ hearing, over the difficulties of the little blue books that began: Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.
In the beginning, they held very close together; for their new fellows were inclined to stand on their dignity, with the pair of interlopers from Class Two. They were all older than Tilly and Laura, and thought themselves wiser: here were girls of sixteen and seventeen years of age, some of whom would progress no farther along the high road of education. As for the boarders who sat in this form, they made up a jealous little clique, and it was some time before the younger couple could discover the secret bond.
Then, one morning, the two were sitting with a few others on the verandah bench, looking over their lessons for the day. Mrs Gurley had snatched a moment’s rest there, on her way to the secretary’s office, and as long as she allowed her withering eye to play upon things and people, the girls conned their pages with a great show of industry. But, no sooner had she sailed away, than Kate Horner leant forward and called to Maria Morell, who was at the other end of the seat: ‘I say, Maria, Genesis LI, 32.’ She held an open Bible in her hand.
Maria Morell frowned caution. ‘Dash it, Kate, mind those kids!’
‘Oh, they won’t savvy.’
But Laura’s eyes were saucers of curiosity, for Tilly, who kept her long lashes lowered, had given her a furious nudge. With a wink and a beck to each other, the bigger girls got up and went away.
‘I say, what did you poke me so hard for?’ inquired Laura, as she and Tilly followed in their wake, at the clanging of the public prayer bell.
‘You soft, didn’t you hear what she said?’
‘Of course I did’—and Laura repeated the reference.
‘Let’s look it up then!’ Under cover of the prayer, Tilly sought it out, and together they bent their heads over it.
On this occasion, Tilly was more knowing than Laura; but on this alone; for when Laura once grasped what they were driving at, she was as nimble-witted as any.
Only a day or two later, it was she who, in face of Kate and Maria, invited Tilly to turn up chapter and verse.
Both the elder girls burst out laughing.
‘By dad!’ cried Kate Horner, and smacked her thigh. ‘This kid knows a thing or two.’
‘You bet! I told you she wasn’t born yesterday.’ And Maria laid her arm round Laura’s shoulders.
Thus was Laura encouraged, put on her mettle; and soon there was no more audacious Bible-reader in the class than she.
The girls were thrown upon the Book of Books for their contraband knowledge, since it was the only frankly outspoken piece of literature allowed within the college walls: the classics studied were rigidly expurgated; the school library was kept so dull that no one over the age of ten much cared to borrow a volume from it. And, by fair means or unfair, it was necessary to obtain information on matters of sex; for girls, most of whom were well across the threshold of womanhood, the subject had an invincible fascination.
Such knowledge as they possessed was a strange jumble, picked up at random: in one direction, they were well primed; in another, supremely ignorant. Thus, though they received lectures on what was called ‘Physiology’, and for these were required to commit to memory the name, say, of every bone and every artery in the body, yet all that related to a woman’s special organs and chief natural function was studiously ignored. The subject being thus chastely shrouded in mystery, they were thrown back on guesswork and speculation—with the quaintest results. The fancies woven by quite big girls, for instance, round the physical feat of bringing a child into the world, would have supplied material for a volume of fairytales. On many a summer evening at this time, in a nook of the garden, heads of all shades might have been seen pressed as close together as a cluster of settled bees; and like the humming of bees, too, were the busy whisperings, and subdued buzzes of laughter, that accompanied this hot discussion of the ‘how’—as a living answer to which, each of them would probably some day walk the world. Innumerable theories were afloat, one more fantastic than another; and the wilder the conjecture, the greater was the respect and applause it gained.
On the other hand, of less profitable information, they had amassed a goodly store. Girls who came from up
-country could tell a lively tale of the artless habits of the blacks; others, who were at home in mining towns, described the doings in Chinese camps—those unavoidable concomitants of gold-grubbing settlements; rhymes circulated that would have staggered a back-blocker; while the governesses were without exception, young and old, kindly and unkindly, laid under such flamboyant suspicions as the poor ladies had, for certain, never heard breathed—since their own impudent schooldays.
This dabbling in the illicit—it had little in common with the opener grime of the ordinary schoolboy—did not even widen the outlook of these girls. For it was something to hush up and keep hidden away, to have qualms, even among themselves, about knowing; and, like all knowledge that, fungus-like, shrinks from the sun, it was stunted and unlovely. Their minds were warped by it, their vision was distorted: viewed through its lens, the most natural human relations appeared unnatural. Thus, not the primmest patterns of family life could hope for mercy in their eyes; over the family, too, man, as read by these young rigorists, was held to leave his serpent’s trail of desire.
For, out of it all, rose the vague, crude picture of woman as the prey of man. Man was animal, a composite of lust and cruelty, with no aim but that of brutally taking his pleasure: something monstrous, yet to be adored; annihilating, yet to be sought after; something to flee, and, at the same time, to entice, with every art at one’s disposal.
As long as it was solely a question of clandestine knowledge and ingenious surmisings, Laura went merrily with the rest: here, no barrier shut her off from her companions. Always a very inquisitive little girl, she was now agog to learn new lore. Her mind, in this direction, was like a clean but highly sensitised plate. And partly because of her previous entire ignorance, partly because of her intense receptiveness, she soon outstripped her comrades, and before long was as one of the most skilful improvisers of the group: a dexterous theorist; a wicked little adept at innuendo.
The Getting of Wisdom Page 12
