South Riding (31 page)

The meal itself represented the shifting compromise between Emma Beddows’ lavish taste and her husband’s vigilant economy. The plates were piled high with bread and butter, currant loaf and queen cakes; the cheese cakes and lemon tarts lay on frilled netted d’oylies; the spice-bread was rich as buttered cold plum pudding; but there was milk, not cream, in the silver-plated jug, and Mrs. Beddows did not dare to ask Sybil for the caddy once the tea-pot had been filled.

Sarah had not learned these subtleties of Beddows housekeeping. She was only aware that Mr. and Mrs. Crossfield dominated the conversation, had every intention of continuing to dominate it, and considered her an inferior intruder.

I can do nothing here, thought Sarah. I was a fool to come.

The talk was fixed on family affairs, on James this and Ernest that, on illnesses and incomes. Sarah crumbled her cake and stirred her tea, and found no word to say about whether a certain Beddows cousin had done well to leave her house at Buxton to live in Boston Spa, or whether a niece called Rose was justified in breaking off her engagement to a veterinary surgeon. Once or twice she tried to engage big shy Willie Beddows in conversation, but at Willow Lodge when either host or hostess talked, the lesser breeds kept silence. One monologue at a time alone was tolerated, and just then Mrs. Beddows was laying down the law about Elizabeth’s cottage—she had paid too much for it; it was money wasted; one big sitting-room and a good kitchen was quite enough for a farmer’s widow. What does she want with dining-room and drawing-room? Always did she put on airs and play at being her betters, did Elizabeth. Then she’ll get into debt and we shall all have to help her out of it.

The voice was the voice of Alderman Mrs. Beddows, but the words were the words of Jim her husband.

You can’t live under the thumb of a mean-minded little auctioneer, Sarah thought, for thirty and more years without being infected by him. And at this moment Mrs. Beddows was not the alderman at all; she was Jim’s wife and Ursula Crossfield’s sister-in-law. No generous impulse, no splendid defiance of common sense and caution, could survive in that atmosphere. Sarah had come to ask Mrs. Beddows not to be sensible. She had come to ask her to use her imagination and take a chance; but this was not the time nor place for persuasion, and she knew it.

She thought of the women of Mrs. Beddows’ generation and of how even when they gave one quarter of their energy to public service they spend the remaining three-quarters on quite unnecessary domestic ritual and propitiation. The little plump woman with the wise lined face might have gone anywhere, done anything; but she would always set limits upon her powers through her desire not to upset her husband’s family.

Listening to the conversation, Sarah became increasingly critical, and as her critical spirit waxed, her tact and caution waned. Mrs. Crossfield had arrived, via spring-cleaning and servants, at the perennial topic of the modern girl, and the modern girl led, inevitably, to lipstick. Mrs. Crossfield expressed her horror of cosmetics. Mrs. Beddows, who in other company might have shared other views, brought out a suitable anecdote, which had two merits; it was true and it flattered the judgment of her sister-in-law.

A new inspector had been appointed for elementary schools. The alderman had talked to him. In the course of conversation somebody had asked him: “‘If you had two candidates for a teaching post before you, with equal qualifications in every way, but one used lipstick and one did not, which would you appoint?’ and he replied: ‘The girl who didn’t plaster with paint the face God gave her, Mrs. Beddows.’” The alderman beamed benevolently at Sarah. “So you see, even you modern educationists sometimes see eye to eye with us old-fashioned people.”

By that time Sarah was tired of keeping silence. She was, after all, a head mistress and unaccustomed to nibbling buns and accepting without controversy the opinions of her elders.

“I don’t know if you call me a modern educationist,” she said rashly, “but I certainly don’t agree with the inspector.”

“Oh, really? Indeed? Indeed?” asked Mrs. Crossfield, looking at Sarah rather as though one of the buns had spoken.

“My trouble,” said Sarah, thinking of Miss Sigglesthwaite, but also by this time feeling irritably perverse, “my trouble is to persuade my girls that membership of my profession need not imply complete indifference to all other sides of life.”

“Your profession?” asked Mrs. Crossfield.

“I teach,” said Sarah proudly.

“Miss Burton is the head mistress of the Girls’ High School at Kiplington,” Mrs. Beddows interpolated—belatedly, thought Sarah, by this time thoroughly roused.

“I regard lipstick as a symbol of self-respect, of interest in one’s appearance, of a hopeful and self-assured attitude towards life,” continued Sarah. “If I had two candidates before me, and they had equal qualifications, but one looked as though she washed her face in sunlight soap and dried it on the hockey field, and the other looked as though she could hold down the post of head mannequin at Molyneux’s, but had chosen to teach instead, I should take the mannequin every time. I should be sure that her influence on the girls would be far wider, more exhilarating and more healthy.”

“Really?” said Mrs. Crossfield. “Oh, Jim, have you heard from Florence Ritchie lately? I had a letter from her in Harrogate two days ago.”

“Don’t you think I should be right, Wendy?” said Sarah combatively, refusing to be snubbed.

But this appeal was too much for Wendy Beddows, caught in the conflict between personalities as formidable as her head mistress and her grandmother. She choked into her tea-cup, and had to be slapped on the back and fly gulping from the room, thus causing a perhaps tactful interruption.

“Shall we go into the drawing-room?” asked Mrs. Beddows.

Sarah realised that she had made a blunder. But her blood was up. She knew far more about modern youth than Mrs. Crossfield. She had more right to speak about schools than Mrs. Beddows. She had come to Willow Lodge on important business. The future of far more than Lydia Holly depended upon her action. Mrs. Beddows had said that she could see her; see her she should.

Sarah sat in a corner of the drawing-room sofa and lit a cigarette. She was behaving badly and she knew it.

But she was still shaken by the shock of hearing about the Hollies’ tragedy. The thought of Lydia’s ordeal had disturbed her deeply. The sight of the girl when she had gone to visit her, of her dull despair, her animal acceptance of fatality, had roused in Sarah the most profound instincts of her nature. She would not accept; she would not be resigned. She would not display a cheerful stoicism towards the misfortunes of other people.

She sat in the ugly cheerful room listening to the ceaseless flow of trivialities, determined to outstay the Crossfield couple.

But it seemed as though they would stay for ever. She thought of the piled-up papers on her desk, the work awaiting her, her engagement she had that evening after supper with Joe Astell. The calendars pinned to the cretonne curtains marked interminable days; the marble clock on the plush-draped overmantel ticked endless hours. At half-past six Sarah realised that she must make her own opportunity.

“Mrs. Beddows,” she said, “I shall have to go, I’m afraid, in a few minutes; but I wonder if you could spare me just a moment or two? To ask you something.”

The alderman looked really surprised, as though no one could possibly want to consult her on public business when her husband’s relatives were in her house; but she said: “Why yes, certainly. What is it?”

“It’s a matter for the governors. I wanted to consult you first before term started. I’m terribly sorry; but this seemed the only opportunity.”

“Oh, very well. Yes. Well, Ursula, can you excuse us for a minute?”

They made their apologies. Mrs. Beddows led Sarah back to the deserted dining-room where now the table lay spread for cold supper, the mutton and salad and blancmange and rhubarb all netted down under cages of blue wire. They sat Sarah in the shabby leather-covered arm-chair, the alderman at her big untidy desk, strewn with unfiled papers. “And how she ever gets through all her work at such a desk,” thought Sarah, “Heaven knows.” But the fact remained that she got through more than five ordinary people and hardly ever confused her facts or lost her documents. Even this irritated Sarah a little, accustomed as she was to training children in habits of order which she declared to be indispensable. Mrs. Beddows constantly disturbed her theories.

“Well? What can I do? What is it?” asked Mrs. Beddows.

You can stop treating those ugly, ignorant, silly, unimportant relations-in-law of yours as though they were God’s step-brothers, snarled Sarah’s disgruntled mind; but aloud she said only: “You know the Hollies?”

“The Hollies—let me see? The Hollies of Cattleholme?”

“No, the Shacks, Kiplington. He’s a builder’s labourer out of work at the moment. The girl comes to the High School on a scholarship. Lydia Holly. She’s the brightest thing we’ve got.”

“Yes—I remember. You told me about her.”

“I think, taking her all round, she’s the most promising child I’ve ever taught. Certainly the only outstanding one in the school at present. And unless we can do something at once, she’s leaving.”

“Oh. Why?”

“She’s the eldest of seven children, now eight with the baby. There’s one elder brother working for Tadman the grocer. They live in a converted railway coach at the Shacks—you know—on the Maythorpe cliff. I’d noticed that the girl had been a bit awkward all this term. Now it appears that she knew her mother was going to have another baby, and she knew too that she’d been warned that it might kill her. She was right. The mother had a fall and died last week. The baby unfortunately lives. Lydia was quite alone in that camp for some time with her mother and the little boy, a toddler. She’s only just fifteen. And now she has to give up her scholarship and go home and look after the children.”

“Poor child. Are there no aunts or any one?”

“No one. I’ve asked. The father’s a hopeless little creature. Good-natured, but drinks on and off and always in and out of work. The aunts are married women with families. Lydia and her father both take it quite for granted.”

“Yes, I suppose she must.”

“But she
can’t
, Mrs. Beddows. It would be monstrous. It’s been bad enough for the girl having that dread hanging over her ever since before Christmas. That’s enough to affect her for life. But then to find that what she dreaded happened— that’s what’s so bad for her—for any one. Children shouldn’t see their worst fears realised. We’ve got to save her.”

Mrs. Beddows sighed. She thought that Sarah looked very young and inexperienced, for all her forty years.

“That’s all very well, but I don’t see we can stop it.”

“We’ve got to. It’s intolerable. Think of the waste.”

“Waste?”

“A girl like that—all that talent—when there’s so little in the world—to come to nothing.”

“She’s got those children to look after.”

“Any one could do that. Listen, Mrs. Beddows. If you can persuade the governors to give her a boarding scholarship, I’ll undertake to see that there’s a woman to look after the children. We might get the baby into a home. Lydia’s too young any way—at fifteen.”

“
You’ll
undertake it? Oh, I’m sorry, Miss Burton. But you can’t begin to do this kind of thing, you know.”

“It’s for my own sake. You don’t get a girl like that in a school like mine—not once in twenty years.”

“Maybe. But if it wasn’t once in fifty you couldn’t do it. It’s not common sense. Hundreds of other women die. Hundreds of other girls have to give up their scholarships. You have to begin as you mean to go on. You can’t take upon yourself the management of the universe. How d’you know Holly would let you do this?”

“He would. He’s the kind of little man who’d take whatever came his way.”

“But you can’t make exceptions—I don’t think for a moment the governors would agree to it. Why a boarder, anyway?”

“Because otherwise she’d be spending all the time she should be doing home-work bathing babies.”

“I wonder how many others of your girls bath babies and help their mothers to run boarding houses?”

“That doesn’t make it right. The world needs the sort of woman Lydia Holly could be.”

“If she’s as fine as you say, she’ll be fine anyway. This may make a woman of her.”

“A drudge.”

“My dear, you know, there are other things in life besides book-learning. What if she does give up her scholarship and doesn’t go to college? There’ll be one school teacher less, and perhaps one fine woman and wife the more. Is that such a tragedy?”

“Yes, yes. All waste is tragedy. To waste deliberately a rare, a unique capacity, that’s downright wicked. It’s treason to the human stock. We need trained intelligence.”

“What about trained character?”

“Oh, that too, yes. I believe in discipline—but not frustration.”

“You believe very much in having your own way, don’t you?”

Sarah looked up in surprise. The room was twilit. The alderman’s face was turned away from the window.

“I believe,” said Sarah gravely, “in being used to the farthest limit of one’s capacity.”

“And you expect people to choose their own ways of fulfilment?”