Another Part of the Wood

by Denis Mackail

  “Oh, Miss Mulberry,” she said. “Do you really mean that? And after you thought you’d got rid of me, and everything?”

  Moreover her eyes became most alarmingly limpid.

  “There, there, Ursula,” said Miss Mulberry. “Of course we’re glad to see you again.”

  (“I don’t believe you are,” said Noodles to herself. “Only why did you say it was lucky, then?”)

  “And you must try and settle down again,” added Miss Mulberry, “just as if there’d never been any idea of your leaving. I dare say it’s a little difficult, but you’ll help us, won’t you?”

  Noodles reflected that it was absolutely impossible. You couldn’t push a grown-up person back into a schoolgirl. But she was pretty certain now that Mr. Cottenham hadn’t explained why the attempt was being made, and this did a great deal to restore her spirits.

  “I’m afraid,” she said, politely, “that I’ve rather forgotten everything I ever learnt here, but——”

  Miss Mulberry didn’t seem to like this suggestion.

  “I mean,” said Noodles, “that when one thinks one’s left school for good, of course one forgets everything. Doesn’t one, Miss Mulberry?”

  Miss Mulberry wondered if Haslemere and the Italian lakes had refreshed her as much as she had imagined.

  “Nonsense, Ursula,” she said. “You oughtn’t to speak like that.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Noodles. “I only thought.…”

  “Well? What?”

  “Well, it’s true, I’m afraid,” said Noodles, rather sadly. “So I thought I’d better tell you. You see——”

  But it was no good explaining, if Miss Mulberry looked at one in that sort of way. And perhaps it was unkind, when she had really tried to teach one such an awful lot.

  “I’m sorry,” said Noodles. “I dare say it’ll all come back. Or bits of it, don’t you know?”

  “You must try and be sensible, Ursula.”

  “Oh, I will. Not that——”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I expect you’re busy, aren’t you?”

  Of course the head-mistress of St. Ethelburga’s was busy on the first day of the summer term. But was she never to be allowed to end these interviews in her own way?

  “Really,” she began: “I——That is——I don’t——”

  But this was mere waste of time.

  “Well, don’t let me hear that you’ve been getting into any more difficulties,” she said, majestically. “You understand me, Ursula?”

  For a moment Noodles had misunderstood her most completely. She had gasped, and blushed, and trembled, and looked like a tigress. But Miss Mulberry’s bewilderment reassured her. It was queer of Mr. Cottenham to have said nothing about the Fitzgibbon affair, but she now definitely knew that he had kept it to himself. It was rather decent of him, she thought, and this decency should be rewarded.

  “I swear,” she said, dramatically, “that I’ll try like—like anything, I mean.”

  She had just been going to say “like the very devil,” but of course that wasn’t the way to begin.

  “I swear——”

  “Well, now I am rather busy,” said Miss Mulberry.

  “What? Oh, I see. All right, Miss Mulberry. Thanks most awfully.”

  “Shut the door!” shouted the head-mistress. “Ursula! Come back and shut the door!”

  But Noodles’s good resolutions had already carried her out of earshot. She was running upstairs, two and sometimes three steps at a time, to finish her unpacking in the little white cubicle. “And after all,” she was saying to herself, “even if I have forgotten everything, it’s their job to teach it me again.” She extricated one stout pair of brown shoes with leather soles from the folds of a bathing-dress. “And anyhow,” she said to herself, “I haven’t forgotten how to swim. And there wouldn’t have been any swimming if I’d stopped at Pippingfold.”

  She looked up, and saw a crowd in the doorless doorway.

  “Hullo!” she said.

  “Hullo, Noodles. I say, we thought you’d left.”

  “Oh, no,” said Noodles. “That was a mistake.”

  “I say, what do you mean?”

  “I mean, I haven’t left. I’ve come back, I mean.”

  “I say, how ripping!”

  Noodles dived into the battered trunk and fished out half a pair of black indoor shoes with low heels.

  “I say, Noodles!”

  “Yumps?”

  She looked rather fierce, with her hair all over her eyes.

  “I say, have you learnt any new tunes?”

  “Oh, yes. Our parlourmaid has a Sunday paper with awfully good tunes in it. I’ve learnt a lot. Do you know Crying and Crooning?”

  Some of the crowd seemed to have heard of this little work, while others hadn’t. But they all wanted to hear it.

  “Oh, do sing it us, Noodles.”

  “I mustn’t,” said Noodles. “Not here, I mean.”

  “Oh, go on, Noodles. Nobody’s listening. They’re all much too busy. Oh, come on, Noodles!”

  “I can’t really. Old Mulberry said——”

  “Oh, bilge,” interrupted one of the crowd. “I don’t believe you know it.”

  “I do!”

  “Well, play it, then. They won’t hear you.”

  “Well, just the chorus.”

  “Is that all you know?”

  “No, of course it isn’t. I can play it beautifully.”

  “Well, play it beautifully, then. I don’t believe you can.”

  Noodles snatched the stringed instrument off the fixed dressing-table, and sat down on the bed, and began to play as beautifully as anyone can play when the performance is also part of an argument.

  “‘Now that you’ve left me,’” she sang. “‘Now that I’m sad; Now that your photo is Driving me mad; Now that I’m lonely, Now that I’m blue.…’”

  There was an upward roll here, and she really did it most awfully well.

  “‘Now that——’”

  She looked up to see if it had been appreciated. To her astonishment, the audience had entirely evaporated. There wasn’t a trace of them.

  “Silly!” said Noodles to herself. “I suppose they think they’re being funny. All right. I shall sing louder than ever.”

  She did so.

  “‘Now that I’m yearning and burning for you-oo.…’ Oh! I beg your pardon, Miss Maplethorpe. I’m awfully sorry. I was just unpacking, I mean, and.…”

  Of course this would happen. On the very first day, too. And just when she’d promised not to get into trouble. Bother! Coming padding along the corridor like that, too. Why couldn’t they have told her?

  Miss Maplethorpe was one of those ones who let you flounder on until you’re in it right up to the neck. Who never said anything until you’d made it all much worse.

  “I mean, I just wanted to see if it was in tune, and I never thought … I mean, it was really just a sort of accident, and of course … I mean, I know one isn’t supposed to, but … I mean, I’m most frightfully sorry about it. I mean——”

  “You mean,” interrupted Miss Maplethorpe, “that you were deliberately breaking a well-known rule. Is that it?”

  “No,” said Noodles. “I mean, yes. I mean——”

  “Perhaps,” said Miss Maplethorpe, silkily, “you’d better let me take care of that—that instrument for you, Ursula. It would be a pity if there were any more—accidents.”

  “Oh, Miss Maplethorpe!”

  “Well?”

  “Oh, please, Miss Maplethorpe! I mean——”

  “Thank you,” said the diabolical Miss Maplethorpe, helping herself to the instrument, and looking very ridiculous with it. “I think the safest place for this will be in my charge. Even if it gets a little out of tune. And please remember, Ursula, that rules are made to be kept. Not to be broken on the first day of a new term. Now perhaps you’d better tidy up some of this extraordinary mess.”

  That was the end of Miss Mapl
ethorpe, for the time being. Some of the crowd came back presently, and pretended to be sympathetic. They pretended, also, to admire poor Noodles for an act of insubordination which was entirely their fault. But she didn’t want their sympathy or their admiration, even if it had been genuine. All she wanted was her stringed instrument, and to be left alone.

  “Oh, go away!” she said, unpacking more vehemently and chaotically then ever.

  The crowd laughed, and went away.

  “Idiot!” said Noodles, meaning herself; and snatched at a nightgown that had stuck in the hinge of the battered trunk; and tore it into two practically equal parts; and danced with exasperation; and knocked the tooth-glass off the little wash-stand and broke it. And rushed to pick it up, and hit her head on an open drawer.

  And said: “Damn!”

  So the summer term at St. Ethelburga’s began very badly indeed. But the awful thing was that it got steadily worse as it went on.

  2

  It wasn’t only that—as she had so conscientiously informed the head-mistress—she had forgotten almost everything that St. Ethelburga had taught her, and that the other mistresses couldn’t be brought to see how easy and natural this was. It wasn’t only that a series of extraordinary misfortunes continued to pursue her, however careful she was to avoid them. It wasn’t only that she could no longer practise the upward roll under the bedclothes—which had been so remarkably comforting in many previous crises. Far worse than any of these incidental annoyances was the continual sensation that she had been caught and put back into prison within three weeks of having earned a quite reasonably honourable discharge. “I never asked to leave,” she said bitterly to herself. “I wouldn’t even have started feeling grown-up, if I’d known I’d got to be here till July. But you can’t possibly feel un-grown-up once you know what it’s like. I don’t say,” she admitted to herself, “that I was doing it so awfully well, and of course, I was most awfully stupid over poor Fitzgibbon, but—well, I’m not anything now. I’m out of it here, and yet I’m stuck in the middle of it. And I know they all wish I’d never come back, but of course they can’t say so. I feel just like one of those backward boys at Mr. Dudgeon’s—only they’re probably a great deal happier. I feel exactly like the Man in the Iron Mask.”

  This interesting historical parallel shows us that Noodles could read, even if she couldn’t spell. Also that she could still remember things which nobody had tried to teach her. But it was, and she knew it, only her age and the lack of precedent which were preventing her from being degraded to a lower class. She simply couldn’t pick up the tangled thread of education where she had so enthusiastically laid it down. Miss Quilter, who was immediately responsible for directing her studies, had to cheat almost openly, over and over again, so as to save her own face and maintain corporate discipline.

  “And yet,” she complained, in the mistresses’ room, “she looks at you all the time as though she knew things that you’d never heard of. I suppose it’s not my business to say so, but whoever sent her back here made the most appalling mistake. Not,” added Miss Quilter, “that she isn’t worth all the rest of my girls put together. In some ways.”

  “In what ways?” asked Miss Maplethorpe.

  “In most ways,” said Miss Quilter.

  “I wish I didn’t agree with you,” said Miss Maplethorpe.

  “It’s true, though,” said Miss Kent.

  “Elle est si mignonne,” said Mademoiselle Lanval, who might perhaps have come up to Noodles’s shoulder. “Mais son écriture—Mon Dieu!”

  “I know who you’re talking about,” said Miss Cowley, who had just come into the room, and must have been reacting slightly after a grammar-lesson in the junior school.

  “Ursula Brett, isn’t it? I thought so. I shall never forget that day, about four years ago, when she …”

  And so on, until the bell rang that sent them all back to the front line. Among these noble but unfortunate women the subject of Noodles seemed absolutely inexhaustible; but they had to do something, of course, when she said that the square root of four hundred and forty-one was seventeen, or that Caedmon was a mountain in Wales. They couldn’t let St. Ethelburga’s go to pieces altogether— because they would have gone with it.

  Meanwhile Noodles had employed her écriture on the extraordinary letter to Sylvia. Extraordinary, in Sylvia’s view, mainly because of its orthography, but extraordinary also because it began so frankly and ended so abruptly. “In case you’re Wondering,” it said, “why I’m here again and not at Pippingfold, the Fact is that their was a Mudle about a man. I wasnt thinking and the fact is that Mr. Cottenham found out and was anoyed. Of Course it was all a Misstake. I shall not discloze his Name, but beware of anyone with a red Face in riding-britches in case he is Still there. This is really confidental as of course I was an apaling (? appalling) Fool but wanted you to know why I cant come over to Green Hatches in Case you are there. Sickening, but I have lernt my Lesson!! So now I am back at Snt. Ethelburgas and …”

  At this point, the ink in the extraordinary letter changed from a deep black—which showed how slowly and painstakingly it had so far been written—to the pale blue of a hurried and almost slap-dash conclusion. The fact was—to use the writer’s favourite phrase—that however sickening it was and however much one was hating it all, one couldn’t possibly complain to a friend like Sylvia. One particularly didn’t want a friend like Sylvia to think she’d got to be sorry for one, or to make this letter anything but an explanation of why one couldn’t come over for tennis.

  “… and it is very fine and we are haveing lots of Games. With love from Noodles.”

  Blot it quickly, and put it in the post-box before one changed one’s mind and said how miserable one was, and how no one realised that one was grown-up, and how one hadn’t even got one’s stringed instrument. And all the other things that one had jolly nearly said. And was thankful that one hadn’t.

  The letter went to Green Hatches and on to Dolphin Street, and Sylvia wrote back most awfully sweetly, you know, but of course not really understanding because how could she? And as Noodles had now nothing left to write about except the fine weather and the lots of games—for less than ever could she complain to anyone as nice as Sylvia—the correspondence automatically closed.

  “Perhaps I’ll see her again one day,” she said to herself. But it was difficult to believe that she ever would. The long weeks of the summer term seemed to stretch out ahead of her to the very crack of doom.

  And then her unlucky star flamed into the sky again.

  3

  On fine mornings in May, June and July, and at about the hour when the golfers on the two Newcliff courses are just finishing their first rounds, a very common spectacle is that of the little processions which emerge from the innumerable red-brick schools, and steer their course towards the sea-coast. The units in these processions—which may be composed of either sex—carry towels and bathing-dresses, and are shepherded on their way by the masters or mistresses who are responsible for getting them into and out of the ocean. This is a part of the units, education on which the schools lay great stress—adopting, in fact, a proprietary attitude towards the English Channel in their prospectuses which reminds one of their similar treatment of the local sunlight and air. As, however, they are very careful to keep out of it whenever it is at all cold or rough, the English Channel has little chance to retaliate. There was a rumour once that one of Mr. Dudgeon’s backward boys had succeeded in getting himself drowned, but as it has not so far reached Mr. Dudgeon one can only suppose that it was greatly exaggerated. Whatever the backward boy’s parents might have felt, one can hardly imagine Mr. Dudgeon overlooking an incident like that.

  So the little processions come shuffling down to the beach—not in the town itself, but in one of those coves which lie between Newcliff and Old Man’s Head—and having undressed among some large and abrasive rocks, they tiptoe with considerable agony to the water’s brink. The swimmers then swim—but on no accoun
t further than the rowing-boat, in which an ancient mariner in a blue jersey bobs about at a distance of about fifteen yards from the shore; while the non-swimmers endeavour to avoid instruction from the ancient mariner’s son, whose method is to catch his victims by the slack of their garments and to tow them along with their heads under water, at the same time adjuring them to Strike Out in a voice that is strangely reminiscent of a fog-horn in full blast. His name is Corcoran, and except when he is keeping one of these educational appointments he employs the style and title of “Professor.” But the schools frown on this attempt to borrow their closely-guarded thunder. They refuse to admit that a man can be a professor simply because he has snakes tattooed on his arms and a voice like a foghorn in full blast. They call him a Well-known Expert in their prospectuses, but that is absolutely as far as they will go.

  After about a quarter of an hour of this ritual, one of the shepherds blows a whistle, and the amphibians all come out again. They dry themselves, in obedience to a running fire of threats and injunctions. They dress themselves, as far as possible in their own clothes. They are formed into another procession. They are carefully checked and counted. And off they stagger on the long climb towards their particular red-brick school. By the time that they eventually reach it, they are all far hotter and stickier than they were when the expedition originally set out. Nevertheless the prospectuses have been vindicated, and the extra expense of a seaside education has been justified. There is no question that they have all either swum or—technically speaking—had a swimming-lesson. Well done, Professor Corcoran; and well done, old Mr. Corcoran out there in the rowing-boat. You can pull up your lobster-pots now and go back to the esplanade. You have done quite as much as many other Well-known Experts, and we cannot—nor will we—say fairer than that.

  But Noodles, for some reason, had always been able to swim. After all, she had said to herself, why not? There was the water, and there were you. And you got into it And you swam. Moreover, you swam so fast that Professor Corcoran had never been able to catch hold of the slack of your garments, and had to content himself with adjuring you to Strike Out—which you were doing anyhow. So you left him, and swam off to the rowing-boat, and hung on to the gunwale and had the most interesting conversations with old Mr. Corcoran about bait and other longshore subjects. Until you heard your name being shouted, and had to leave him and swim back again. And then the nicest part of the day was over, and you went back to St. Ethelburga’s for boiled mutton and rice-pudding, and for the interminable tedium of afternoon school.