The next morning, however, on waking, when, with a throb, she had accounted for the leaden weight on her mind, she was braver, and quite determined to make a clean breast of her misdoing. Things could not go on like this. But no sooner was she plunged into the routine of the day than her decision slackened: it was impossible to find just the right moment to begin. Early in the morning, everyone was busy looking over lessons, and would not thank you for the upset; the dinner hour was all too short; after school, on the walk, she had a partner who knew nothing about the affair; and after tea, she practised. Hence, on Monday, her purpose failed her.
On Tuesday, it was the same; the right moment never presented itself.
In bed that night, she multiplied the remaining days into hours. They made one hundred and twenty. That heartened her a little; considered thus, the time seemed very much longer; and so she let Wednesday slip by, without over-much worry.
On Thursday, she not only failed to own up, but indulged anew.
All the week, as if Mary Pidwall’s coming visit worked upon them, the girls had been very greedy for more love story, and had shown themselves decidedly nettled by Laura’s refusal to continue: for this was the week when the great revelation she had hinted at, should have been made. And one afternoon, when the four were twitting her, and things were looking very black, Laura was incited by some devil, to throw them, not, it is true, the savoury incident their mouths water for, but a fresh fiction—just as the beset traveller throws whatever he has at hand, to the ravenous wolves that press round his sleigh. At the moment, the excitement that accompanies inspiration kept her up; afterwards, she had a stinging fit of remorse; and her self-reproaches were just as bitter as those of the man who has again broken the moral law he has vowed to respect, and who now sees that he is powerless against recurring temptation.
When she remembered those four rapacious faces, Laura realised that, come what might, she would never have the courage to confess. To them, at least. That night, in deep humility, she laid her sin bare to God, imploring Him, even though He could not pardon it, to avert the consequences from her.
The last days were also darkened by her belief that M. P. had got wind of her romancings: as, indeed, was quite likely; for the girls’ tongues were none too safe. Mary looked at her from time to time with such a sternly suspicious eye that Laura’s very stomach quaked within her.
And meanwhile the generous hours had declined to less than half.
‘Twice more to get up, and twice to go to bed,’ she reckoned aloud to herself, on Saturday morning.
She was spending that weekend at Godmother’s. It was as dull there as it usually was; she had leisure to brood over what lay before her. It was now a certainty, fixed, immovable; for, by leaving school that day, without having spoken, she had burned her ships behind her. When she went back on Monday, M. P. would be there, and every loophole closed. On Sunday evening, she made an excuse and went down into the garden. There was no moon, but overhead, the indigo-blue was a prodigal glitter of stars—myriads of silver eyes that perforated the sky. They sparkled with a cold disregard of the small girl standing under the huge old mulberry tree; but Laura, too, was only half-alive to their magnificence. Her thoughts ran on suicide, on making an end of a blighted career: God was evidently not going to be generous or long-suffering enough to come to her aid; and, in fancy, she saw the fifty-five gain on her, like a howling pack of hyenas; saw Mrs Gurley, Mr Strachey—Mother. Detection and exposure, she knew it now, were the most awful things the world held. But she had nothing handy: neither a rope, nor poison, nor was there a dam in the neighbourhood.
That night she had the familiar dream that she was being stood up and expelled, as Annie Johns had been: thousands of tongues shouted her guilt; she was hunted like a wallaby. She wakened with a scream, and Marina, who was her bedfellow, sat up and lighted a candle. Crumpled and dishevelled, Laura lay on her back, outside the sheet that was her sole covering; and her pillow had slid to the floor.
‘What on earth’s the matter? Dreaming? Then depend on it, you’ve eaten something that’s disagreed with you.’
How she dragged her legs back to school that morning, Laura never knew. As they came in sight of the grey building, her inner disturbance was such that she was nearly sick. Even the unobservant Marina was forced to remark.
‘You do look a bit peaky. I’m sure your stomach’s out of order. You should take a dose of castor oil tonight, before you go to bed.’
Though it was a blazing November day, her fingers were cold, as she took off her hat and changed her white frock. ‘For the last time,’ she murmured: by which she meant, the last time in untarnished honour. And she folded and hung up her clothes, with a neatness that was foreign to her.
Classes were in full swing when she went downstairs; nothing could happen now till the close of morning school. But Laura signalised the beginning of her downfall, the end of her comet-like flight, by losing her place in one form after another, the lessons she had prepared on Friday evening having gone clean out of her head.
Directly half-past twelve struck, she ran to the top of the garden, and hid herself under a tree. There she crouched, her fingers in her ears, her heart thumping as if it would break. Till the dinner bell rang. Then she was forced to emerge—and no tottering criminal, about to face the scaffold, has ever had more need of Dutch courage than Laura, in this moment. Peeping round the corner of the path, she saw the fateful group: M. P. the pivot of four gesticulating figures. She loitered till they had scattered and disappeared; then, with shaking legs, she crept to the house. At the long tables, the girls still stood, waiting for Mr Strachey; and the instant Laura set foot in the hall, five pairs of eyes caught her, held her, pinned her down, as one pins a butterfly to a board. She was much too far gone to think of tossing her head and braving things out, now the crisis had come. Pale, guilty, wretched, she sidled to her seat. This was near Maria’s, and, as she passed, Maria leant back.
‘You vile little liar!’
‘How’s that shy little mouse of a girl we had here a month or so ago?’ Mr Shepherd had inquired. ‘Let me see—what was her name again?’
To which Miss Isabella had replied: ‘Well, you know, Robby dear, you really hardly saw her. You had so much to do, poor boy, just when she was here. I think you were scarcely in the house. Her name was Laura—Laura Rambotham.’
And Mrs Shepherd gently: ‘Yes, a nice little girl. But very young for her age. And so shy.’
‘You wretched, little lying sneak!’
In vain Laura wept and protested.
‘You made me do it. I should never had told a word, if it hadn’t been for you.’
This point of view enraged them. ‘What! You want to put it on us now, do you…you dirty little skunk! To say we made you tell that pack of lies?—Look here: as long as you stay in this blooming shop, I’ll never open my mouth to you again!’
‘Someone ought to tell old Gurley and have her expelled. That’s all she’s fit for. Spreading disgusting stores about people who’ve been kind to her. They probably only asked her there, out of charity. She’s as poor as dirt.’
‘Wants her bottom smacked—that’s what I say!’ Thus Maria, and with her, Kate Horner.
Tilly was paler, and more bitter. ‘I was a dashed fool ever to believe a word. I might have known her little game. She! Why, when I took her to see my cousin Bob, she was afraid to say boo to a goose. He laughed about her afterwards, like anything; said she ought to have come in a perambulator, with a nurse. You make anyone in love with you—you!’ And Tilly spat, to show her disdain.
‘What have they been saying to you, Laura?’ whispered Chinky, pale and frightened. ‘Whatever’s the matter?’
‘Mind your own business, and go away!’ sobbed Laura.
‘I am, I’m going,’ said Chinky humbly. ‘Oh, Laura, I wish you had that ring.’
‘Oh, blow you and your ring! I hate the very name of it!’ cried Laura, maddened. And retreating to a lavatory, which
was the only private place in the school, she wept her full.
They all, every girl of them, understood white lies, and practised them. They might also have forgiven her a lie of the good, plain, straightforward, thumping kind. What they could not forgive, or get over, was the extraordinary circumstantiality of the untruths with which she had gulled them: to be able to invent lies, with such proficiency, meant that you were born with a criminal bent. And as a criminal she was accordingly treated.
Even the grown-up girls heard a garbled version of the story.
‘Why ever did you do it?’ one of them asked Laura curiously; it was a very pretty girl called Evelyn, with twinkling brown eyes.
‘I don’t know,’ said Laura abjectly; and this was true.
‘But I say! nasty tarradiddles about people who’d been so nice to you! What made you tell them?’
‘I don’t know. They just came.’
The girl’s eyes smiled. ‘Oh, I say! Poor little kiddy!’ she said as she turned away.
But this was the only kind word Laura heard. For many a night after, she cried herself to sleep.
XIX
Thus Laura went to Coventry. Not that the social banishment she now suffered was known by that name. To the majority of the girls, Coventry was just a word in the geography book, a place where ribbons were said to be made, and where, for a better-read few, someone had hung with grooms and porters on a bridge; this detail, odd to say, making a deeper impression on their young minds than the story of Lady Godiva, which was looked upon merely as a naughty anecdote.
But, by whatever name it was known, Laura’s ostracism was complete. She had been sampled, tested, put on one side. And not the softest-hearted could find an excuse for her behaviour.
It was but another instance of how misfortune dogs him who is down, that Chinky should choose this very moment to bring further shame upon her.
On one of the miserable days that were now the rule, when Laura would have liked best to be a rabbit, safely burrowed in its warren; as she was going upstairs one afternoon, she met Jacob, the man-of-all-work, coming down. He had a trunk on his shoulder. Throughout the day, she had been aware of a subdued excitement among the boarders; they had stood about in groups, talking in low voices—talking about her, she fancied, for glances were thrown over shoulders at her, as she passed. She made herself as small as she could; but when teatime came, and then supper, and Chinky had not appeared at either meal, curiosity got the better of her, and she tried to pump one of the younger girls.
Maria came up while she was speaking, and the child ran away; for the little ones aped their elders in making Laura taboo.
‘What, liar! You want to stuff us you don’t know why she’s gone?’ said Maria. ‘No, thank you, it’s not good enough. You can’t bamboozle us this time!’
‘Sapphira up to her tricks again, is she?’ threw in the inseparable Kate, who had caught the last words. ‘No, by dad, we don’t tell liars what they know already. So put that in your pipe and smoke it!’
Only bit by bit did Laura dig out their meaning: then, the horrible truth lay bare. Chinky had been dismissed—privately because she was a boarder—from the school. Her crime was: she had taken half a sovereign from the purse of one of her room-mates. When taxed with the theft, she wept that she had not taken it for herself, but to buy a ring for Laura Rambotham; and, with this admission on her lips, she passed out of their lives, leaving Laura, her confederate, behind. Yes, confederate; for, in the minds of most, liar and thief were synonymous.
Laura had not cared two straws for Chinky; she found what the latter had done, ‘mean and disgusting’, and said so, stormily; but of course was not believed. Usually too proud to defend herself, she here returned to the charge again and again; for the hint of connivance had touched her on the raw. But she strove in vain to prove her innocence: she could not get her enemies to grasp the abysmal difference between merely making up a story about people, and laying hands on others’ property; if she could do the one, she was capable of the other; and her companions remained convinced that, if she had not actually had her fingers in someone’s purse, she had, by a love of jewellery, incited Chinky to the theft. And so after a time, Laura gave up the attempt, and suffered in silence; and it was suffering; for her schoolfellows were cruel with that intolerance, that unimaginative dullness, which makes a woman’s cruelty so hard to bear. Laura had to accustom herself to have every word she said, doubted; to hear someone called to, before her face, to attest her statements; to see her room-mates lock up their purses under her very nose.
However, only three weeks had still to run till the Christmas holidays. She drew twenty-one strokes on a sheet of paper, which she pinned to the wall above her bed; and each morning, on getting up, she ran her pencil through a fresh line. She was quite resolved to beg Mother not to send her back to school: if she said she was not getting proper food, that would be enough to put Mother up in arms.
The boxes were being fetched from the lumber rooms and distributed among their owners, when a letter arrived from Mother, saying that the two little boys had sandy blight, and that Laura would not be able to come home, under two or three weeks, for fear of infection. These weeks she was to spend, in company with Pin, at a watering place down the Bay, where one of her aunts had a cottage.
The news was welcome to Laura: she had shrunk from the thought of Mother’s searching eye. And, at the cottage, none of her grown-up relatives would be present. Only an old housekeeper was there, looking after a party of big boys.
Hence, when Speech Day was over, instead of setting out on an up-country railway journey, Laura, under the escort of Miss Snodgrass, went on board one of the steamers that ploughed the Bay.
‘I should say sea air’ll do you good—brighten you up a bit,’ said the governess affably, as they drove: she was in great good humour at the prospect of losing sight, for a time, of the fifty-five. ‘You seem to always be in the dumps nowadays. What’s the matter with you?’
Laura dutifully waved her handkerchief, from the deck of the ‘Silver Star’; and the paddles began to churn. As Miss Snodgrass’s back retreated down the pier, and the breach between ship and land widened, Laura settled herself on her seat, with a feeling of immense relief. At last!—at last she was off. The morning had been a trial to her: in all the noisy and effusive leave-taking, she had been odd man out; no one was sorry to part from her; no one had extracted a promise that she would write. Her sole valediction had been a minatory shaft from Maria: if she valued her skin, to learn to stop telling crams, before she showed up there again. Now, she was free of them; she would not be humiliated afresh, would not need to stand eye to eye with anyone who knew of her disgrace, for weeks to come; perhaps never again, if Mother agreed. Her heart grew momentarily lighter. And the further they left Melbourne behind them, the higher her spirits rose.
But then, too, was it possible, on this radiant December day, long to remain in what Miss Snodgrass had called ‘the dumps’? The sea was a blue-green mirror, on the surface of which they swam. The sky was a stretched sheet of blue, in which the sun hung, a very ball of fire. But the steamer cooled the air as it moved; and none of the white-clad people, who, under the stretched white awnings, thronged the deck, was oppressed by the great heat. Though colourless of skin—except for the freckles that peppered them—they were, in manner, both a little loud, and a little over-lively; their ringing voices were accompanied by unstudied gestures. In the middle of the deck, a brass band played popular tunes.
At a pretty watering place, where they stopped, Laura rose and crossed to the opposite railing. A large number of people went ashore, pushing and laughing, but almost as many more came on board, all dressed in white, with eager, animated faces. Then the boat stood to sea again, and sailed past high, grass-grown cliffs, from which a few old cannons pointed their noses at you, watching over the safety of the Bay—in the event, say, of the Japanese or the Russians entering the Heads; past the pretty township, and the beflagged bathing enc
losures on the beach below. They neared the tall, granite lighthouse at the point, with the flagstaff at its side, where incoming steamers were signalled; and as soon as they had rounded this corner, they were in view of the Heads themselves. From the distant cliffs there ran out, on either side, brown reefs, which made the inrushing water dance and foam, and the entrance to the Bay narrow and dangerous: on one side, there projected the portion of a wreck, which had been there as long as Laura had been in the world. Then, having made a sharp turn to the left, the boat crossed to the opposite coast, and steamed past the white, barrack-like buildings of quarantine, lying asleep in the fierce sunshine of the afternoon; and, in due course, it stopped at Laura’s destination.
Old Anne was waiting on the jetty, having hitched the horse to a post: she had driven in, in the ‘shandrydan’, to meet Laura. For the cottage was not on the front beach, which faced the Bay, with its hotels and boarding houses, its fenced-in baths, and great gentle slope of yellow sand: it stood in the bush, on the back beach, which gave to the open sea.
Laura took her seat beside the old woman in her linen sun bonnet, the body of the vehicle being packed full of groceries and other stores; and the drive began. Directly they were clear of the township, the road was good as ceased, became a mere sandy track, running through a scrub of tea-trees. And what sand! White, dry, sliding sand, through which the horse shuffled and floundered, in which the wheels sank and stuck. Had one of the many hillocks to be taken, the two on the box-seat instinctively threw their weight forward; old Anne, who had a stripped wattle bough for a whip, urged and cajoled; and more than once she handed Laura the reins and got down, to give the horse a pull. They had always to be ducking their heads, too, to let the low tea-tree branches sweep over their backs.
About a couple of miles out, the old woman alighted and slipped a rail; and, having passed the only other house within cooee, they drove through a paddock, but at a walking pace, because of the thousands of rabbit burrows that perforated the ground. Another slip-rail was lowered, and they drew up at the foot of a steepish hill, beside a sandy little vegetable garden, a shed, and a pump. The house was perched on the top of the hill, and directly they sighted it, they also saw Pin flying down, her sun bonnet on her neck.
The Getting of Wisdom Page 17
