‘Then he will have to fend for himself,’ said Bisto sorrowfully.
‘We must all learn to be independent,’ said Rachel. ‘Even rats.’ And, feeling more like her old self, she adopted Chief’s manner and continued: ‘Gud has put into our hands – into our paws – the priceless power to make our own way in this weary wicked world of ours. Gud will help us if we ask Him, but – do we want to ask Him? A thousand times, no! Rats, let us stand on our own four feet – paws – and battle our way on, secure in the knowledge that underneath are the everlasting paws, and recognizing bravely that our weakness is His strength – or the other way round, I really can’t remember.
‘“Make strong in me a heart too brave
To ask Thee anything.”
‘D’you hear that, Willy?’ And Bisto joining in with her, the two girls chanted to the wondering rat:
‘“Make strong in me a heart too bravea
To ask Thee anything.”’
‘Oh, he is greedy,’ cried Bisto ruefully. ‘He’s taken the bit of meat now that was intended to be saved up for the feast at the end. And I tucked it right away at the bottom of the pile.’
‘Trust Willy,’ said Rachel. ‘He knows when he’s on to a good thing. No Bampfield self-control for him. I don’t suppose Gud will mind. He probably has a different law for rats.’
It was a melancholy end of term. Being the summer, there were no special religious festivities, nothing to shed a ritual light over the breaking-up, only Chief’s voice intoning mellifluously the usual end of term lesson:
‘“Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days. Give a portion to seven, and also to eight.”’
Bisto heard it with tears in her eyes. It reminded her of Willy. Hateful though Bampfield was to her, her leaving it was painful. She said goodbye to Rachel as though she would never see her again. And Rachel, too, left in deepest dejection. Only Margaret, whispering and laughing with Rena, seemed glad to go, and jumped into the school bus, suitcase in hand, without even saying goodbye to Rachel.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Why have I blabb’d? Who shall be true to us
When we are so unsecret to ourselves?
SHAKESPEARE
IT was a golden October that year. A St Luke’s summer. I was now house captain, and enjoyed the responsibility. My work was enthralling to me. I was discovering the delights of Horace, and translating him into English verse for the appreciative eye of Miss Burnett. I had also embarked on the Georgics and was entirely (and for ever) charmed by them, recognizing in them something of my own delight in the cycle of the seasons. It seemed as I read them that I looked out on Virgil’s landscape from my windows. My parody-making was put aside permanently. I was now on the side of the angels. Bisto was gone, and of Margaret I saw nothing.
My position threw me more than ever into the company of my housemistress, Georgie Murrill. There were long pleasant evenings spent in her room, and it was to her, on one expansive occasion, that I spoke of the Chinese garden.
‘I was looking for you everywhere this afternoon,’ said Georgie, ‘to talk to you about the house team. I felt we ought to draw it up or they won’t have sufficient time to practise. You weren’t playing games, were you? You were crossed off the list. Where had you got to? Up the centre path?’
‘No, I didn’t play games,’ said Rachel. ‘I was reading Byron.’
The white, gilt Adam fireplace was stacked with logs and the lights were turned out except for a reading lamp. Rachel sat opposite Georgie, her legs stretched out to the blaze, drinking coffee. To talk of teams bored her. She wanted to talk about herself. Now Bisto was gone, and Margaret inaccessible, she relied more and more on Georgie’s company. The two became intimate. Georgie treated her as a privileged friend and discussed with her her private affairs. In this dangerous game, there were no known rules. Georgie allowed herself to invest Rachel with the discrimination and experience of an adult, while Rachel accorded to her the honest and faithful dealing of a contemporary. Younger than most of the staff, Georgie found in Rachel a touchstone which renewed in herself the qualities she had not quite lost, the curiosity, the ardour and the unexpectedness of youth. The poetry and music which were Rachel’s passions, restored in Georgie pleasure in things which after years of teaching she had half forgotten. She reread Keats in order that she could understand Rachel’s eager discussion of his poetry and his letters. She played Beethoven and Mozart duets with her and learnt the accompaniments of Schubert songs in order that Rachel could sing them.
‘Don’t let’s talk about hockey teams,’ said Rachel lazily. ‘Let’s play the “Jupiter”.’
‘It’s too late. We should get into trouble.’ (Thus were they subtly drawn into alliance against Bampfield.)
‘Just the slow movement,’ said Rachel, putting down her coffee cup, and moving towards the piano. ‘Just the slow movement, played softly.’
But Georgie was irritated. She had wanted Rachel that afternoon, and had not been able to find her. Possessive, she did not like to feel that Rachel was playing a game of which she knew nothing.
‘You weren’t in the prefects’ room, or the library. Where were you?’
‘Oh, I have my secret hide-outs,’ said Rachel, with arrogant indifference.
There was a moment’s silence. The firelight played on their faces and neither understood the other’s expression, and it was now that Rachel, always a bad judge of the moment, chose to entrust to Georgie the one secret she should never have given up.
‘As a matter of fact I was out,’ she said.
Instinct told Georgie to make no comment. She sensed a coming confidence and waited for it.
‘You know the shrubbery near the stables,’ said Rachel slowly. Even as she spoke she was aware of an acute pain, like the extraction of a tooth. But it was too late to go back now. The roots were shifting. They would never take hold again.
‘Yes.’
‘There’s a garden in there. A Chinese garden.’
‘What do you mean exactly?’
‘There are lakes, and it was once laid out as a Chinese garden, like a willow-pattern plate, with a pagoda and bridges and a boat and everything.’
‘How did you get in? It’s always been kept securely locked. Chief has never let anyone in there, because the bridges were so rotten. We explored it when we first came here from Somerset, and it’s been locked ever since for safety.’
‘Yes, the bridges are rotten.’
Into Rachel’s mind came a picture of the scene. Almost she could visualize round it the blue rim of a plate.
‘Go on, Rachel. Do tell me more. How did you get in?’
Rachel was silent.
‘Do tell me.’
‘I … oh, well, I just go in there and read poetry,’ said Rachel lamely, evading the question.
‘In the middle of October?’
‘Yes. It’s warm in the boat. There are dried ferns and moss.’
‘It sounds very romantic. You must take me to see it.’
‘Oh, I don’t think you’d want to go,’ said Rachel quickly. ‘It would mean scrambling through the fence and undergrowth, and…’
‘You climb through the fence, do you?’ asked Georgie, with amusement. ‘How resourceful. Does anyone else know of this?’
‘No,’ answered Rachel. ‘No. Nobody else knows about it.’
‘Well, you know I shall keep it dark.’
‘Please, Georgie, yes. You will, won’t you?’
It was the first time that Rachel had used her nickname, and Georgie was touched and flattered. She did not understand the depth or the nature of the emotion that prompted it.
‘Of course, I’ll keep it quite secret,’ she said. ‘Cross my heart. It’s time you went to bed.’
Rachel looked at her uncertainly. ‘Is it a promise?’ she asked.
The air was full of unacknowledged and unrecognized emotions.
‘A sacred promise,’ said Georgie, and Rachel left the firelit room fo
r the dark gallery.
She walked slowly to the balustrade and looked down. The stairs were faintly visible in the distant light of a bulb burning in the hall. A smell of wood-smoke still hung about her clothes and its natural, associated smell, uncovering memories of leaf mould and wet branches, sent a slow thrusting pain into her heart. The garden was no longer her own. It had, in a sense, never been wholly hers, since Margaret and Rena used it – Rena? Yes, of course, she suddenly realized, Rena must know it, too. But their knowledge was as secret as her own, and a bond between themselves and the garden, even if of a different nature from her bond with it. And now she had voluntarily let a stranger in.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A man betrayed is a man destroyed.
JOSEPH CONRAD
THE cataclysm broke about a fortnight later. The prefects were summoned by Chief. She was very pale, her eyes hard and piercing. She told us that Margaret and Rena had been discovered in some situation with which, it appeared, we were expected to be familiar, since it was not explained to us. The two girls were to be removed from the school. Pending the arrival of the parents, they were isolated in the infirmary, in separate rooms. They were, I learned afterwards, locked in. This nameless vice of which they were guilty was, apparently, infectious. We were told that as prefects we had a grave responsibility. It was up to us to keep our eyes open to see if the disease was spreading. We were adjured, like the apostles, to watch and pray.
Stunned, we prefects left the presence and retreated in conclave to our room. There I suppose we talked it over. We must have been like a group of savages holding a conference over their first sight of an aeroplane, and suffered from a similar, stultifying lack of vocabulary. How much the others subsequently found out, I never discovered. I myself applied for information to Georgie Murrill. After a little hesitation, and in a manner withdrawn and uneasy, she told me that the two girls had been found naked in bed together. This was quite sufficient for me. Though still ignorant of the exact nature of the vice, my fairly extensive reading had taught me that more than one person to a bed generally spelt wickedness. It was not, however, till that evening that it spelt anything more for me.
After supper I went to work in my study, a small room rather isolated in a distant wing of the house. I could hear a terrible crying and lamenting coming from the windows of the infirmary over which my study looked. I have never in my life heard such another sound. It was like the cries of the damned in hell. It went on and on interminably. The air was rent with grief. I left my work, profoundly moved, and went down to the prefects’ room to sit in silence with the others round a dying fire.
* * *
Next day Margaret and Rena were taken away, and in the late afternoon Chief sent for Rachel. She was sitting in her small dark office, her back to the window, so that the girl’s face was well lighted, but Chief’s was blank with shadows. Chief knew something of the technique of interrogation. Without any preliminary, she asked Rachel whether she had ever spoken to Margaret about a book called The Well of Loneliness. She would accept no explanations. The answer must be yes or no. Yes, Rachel replied, they had had a conversation about this book which she had not herself read. Chief asked her if she knew what the book was about. Rachel found this difficult to answer. Dimly she was beginning to understand the nature of the crime committed by these two girls, but she was far from being able to put it into words. Chief accepted her assurance that she had not read the book, and told her that it was ‘filthy’.
‘This book has been brought into the school by Margaret,’ she went on. ‘It has been found among her belongings. Even if you have not read it, and I accept your word over that, I find it difficult to understand why, as a prefect, you kept silent about it. You knew that Margaret had no right to have in her possession a book that had not been passed by her housemistress. You knew – you must have known – it had not and would never have been passed.’
Yes, Rachel knew it well enough. It was a breach of her prefectorial trust and she could do nothing but admit it.
‘You are making it difficult for me to trust you,’ said Chief. ‘Other matters have now come to my knowledge that make it more difficult still. I am going to tell you exactly what they are, and I am going to ask you a question – a serious question – which I will give you time to think over before you answer.’
Chief then informed Rachel that it was her name to which Margaret and Rena had constantly referred. Rachel, it appeared, was the only human and decent individual at Bampfield. Margaret had stressed her unconventionality and her comfortable disregard for rules, and declared that her friendship with Rachel had alone made life in this prison tolerable. She admired Rachel for having the courage to criticize a hateful and tyrannical regime. With a legacy of parody behind her, Rachel could hardly deny that she had criticized it. Chief remembered that she had parodied a religious poem on one occasion, and that she never went to Communion. She mentioned these points, and Rachel felt that she was forejudged.
‘How do I know that I can trust you?’ repeated Chief, in a level, unemotional voice.
‘I haven’t read the book,’ reiterated Rachel, clinging desperately to this one solid piece of evidence.
‘I accept that. But you have talked of it.’
‘Margaret talked to me about it.’
‘What did she say?’
‘I … can’t remember.’
‘Perhaps she was speaking of it that night you met her in the back corridor.’
Rachel could say nothing. For a moment she was too stunned to recall the occasion.
‘Have you forgotten?’ persisted Chief. ‘Some time ago … in the spring term. You asked my permission to go round the house once. That was at ten o’clock. You abused that permission. At eleven thirty you were found standing in the corridor talking to Margaret.’
Rachel said nothing. Miss Burnett, for whom she had translated Virgil, and with whom she had enjoyed some of the keenest pleasure of her Bampfield life – Miss Burnett had betrayed her, had used her knowledge in an adult game of which Rachel knew too little.
Chief pressed home her advantage. How close was this friendship with Margaret, she asked, and when Rachel still could not trust herself to answer – and, in any case, what could she know of the degrees of friendship? – Chief leaned back in her chair and said with deliberation:
‘It is difficult for me to believe that the friendship was not … very close, that this was the only occasion on which you met Margaret at night.’
She waited for a moment for the words to take effect, and then leaned forward again to deliver another blow.
‘You have found a garden, I understand – a Chinese garden in the far shrubbery. It is a place that I put out of bounds when we first came here. Yet it appears that you have been visiting it – by your own admission. Is it news to you that it was there that Margaret and Rena often met to carry on their filthy practices?’
The question hardly touched Rachel’s consciousness. At the door of her mind hammered a far more monstrous question. How did Chief know that she had visited the garden? Her conversation with Georgie Murrill assumed a fearful personality of its own, pushed aside the lamenting of the two girls and the petty evidence of a book and a meeting by night. It stood, Judas-like, awaiting recognition. With a desperate effort, Rachel held the door of her thoughts against its insistent knocking.
Chief delivered her peroration: repeatedly, in her distress, Margaret had called the name of Rachel Curgenven. She had asked to see her, over and over again. Rachel Curgenven would have understood, she insisted in the hearing of her parents and of Rena’s. She put it more positively. Rachel Curgenven did understand. Naturally, the parents demanded an inquiry. Their daughters had been corrupted. There was talk of a legal action against the school. Rachel would be called into court.
I am afraid of many things, of the dark, of heights, of a crowd, but no fear I have ever felt quite matches the inexorable terror of that phrase ‘called into court’. This was not the splen
did, purgative fear of the Chinese garden at night. This was the unholy, the unclean fear of the unknown hand in the dark, that cannot be parried.
Chief asked Rachel for a truthful answer to the accusation that she had both condoned and encouraged the activities of Margaret and Rena. She gave her three days to think it over.
Fear reigned at the centre of Bampfield, yet Rachel hardly realized that this was so. Her own fear at those terrible words ‘called into court’ temporarily anaesthetized her against other, more dreadful certainties. She was absorbed with the problem of her own innocence. She did not visualize herself as the lynch-pin on which depended the future of a whole community. Still less did she foresee the fearful likelihood that if her guilt could be proved, the whole weight of the collective guilt of Bampfield could be shifted on to her shoulders. As yet, she was not isolated. She was still a part of Bampfield, and felt her fear and her own innocence, as a thread in the whole fabric. Despite Chief’s interrogation, she did not feel that Bampfield, in the person of Chief, or Georgie, or Miss Burnett, had finally betrayed and jettisoned her.
It was to Georgie Murrill that Rachel turned, deeply distressed by her own ignorance and by her fears for her innocence, and still unable to believe that the final betrayal could come from her hand.
The forbidding label Engaged was hanging on her door, an injunction which Rachel had never dared to disregard before. But tonight she ignored it. She knocked firmly and went in without waiting to be answered. Georgie was sitting by her fire, reading, in her dressing-gown. She got up as Rachel came in, her face angry, her eyes defensive.
‘There’s an Engaged notice on my door,’ she said.
‘I know, I know, but I had to come. I’ve been with Chief.’
‘I … yes, I know you have,’ answered Georgie.
Rachel suddenly realized the implication of her own words. She had, in fact, believed that Georgie could not have known. The ‘Engaged’ notice was her evidence. With the directness of which children are still capable, she said quickly, ‘You knew I was seeing Chief tonight? Then why the “Engaged”? You must have known l should come to you afterwards.’
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