South Riding (50 page)

The choking giggles in the corner roused her.

She raised her mild short-sighted eyes and saw Midge Carne enthroned, the ring of girls below her, the A.S.S. notice fluttering by her head.

Pushing her bicycle painfully into its place, panting with effort, she withdrew. The suppressed giggles broke into a guffaw as she shut the door.

“My dear, I could have died!”

“Midge, you were
awful.
”

“Do you think she’ll guess?”

“Whatever
will
she say?”

“She’ll never dare do anything. She can’t report us unless she shows our essays to Sally and she’ll never dare do that! The Sigglesback. Long live the Sigglesback!”

“Bet you she never even sees the point at all.”

It did not occur to them that their gloating voices rang clear and unmistakable through the wooden wall, and that Miss Sigglesthwaite, trudging up the path to the science room, heard every word.

She did not stop to listen. She had been educated according to a code which declared eavesdropping to be dishonourable. But though she despised these children, though they bored her inexpressibly, she could not learn complete indifference to them.

When on Thursday evening she packed the pile of nature notebooks into her basket and cycled back with them to her lodgings, she was acutely aware of hatred and contempt surrounding her.

Miss Sigglesthwaite’s landlady served her with high tea. It was less trouble. She had to-night provided a smoked kipper. Because Agnes was late it seemed a peculiarly dried and bony kipper, yet its oily effulgence penetrated the air of the bed-sitting-room as though it had been the fattest and juiciest on the east coast. Before she entered the room, Agnes had a headache; she had not been there long before she felt sick as well. Edie’s letter was no more cheerful than usual. Her wireless battery had run down and she had decided to economise by selling the whole thing.

She dismissed her tea uneaten, closed her window because the fire smoked when she opened it, and shut herself in with the nature notebooks.

There was no reason why she should dread them so much. She scolded her apprehensive mind and cowardly heart. After all—what were these vulgar stupid little adolescents? Why should she care whatever they did or said?

She laid the books on the crimson tablecloth; she brought out her red ink and her marking pen. She sat down stalwartly beside them. She breathed her prayer for grace, “Lord, give me patience.”

She opened Gwynneth Rogers’ composition upon “The Life and Habits of the Sigglesback.”

Gwynneth, Maud, Nancy, Enid, Midge. Mechanically underlining words, surrounding blots with red circles, counting spelling faults, Agnes Sigglesthwaite went through the blurred uneven pages. She learned that she was dull, dirty, ugly, boring; that she had silly manners; that her hair was a bird’s nest and her dress untidy.

“The Sigglesback never mates; it is too bony. Also it has a most peculiar smell. It builds nests in its hair for breeding purposes. It has no voice but a kind of piping squeak when it is angry.”

They were not clever children. They had small powers of invention. Their venom outran their wit.

But it was enough for Agnes. It was too much.

Oh, cruel, cruel! They want to drive me away.

Do they think I
like
it? Do they think I want to stay here? Do they think it’s fun to put aside the important work I know I could do, and set nature essays to be mangled by their crude nasty little minds?

But they’re right. They’re right. That is what makes it intolerable. Because I ought not to be here. I’m no use with children. I dislike them. They bore me.

But Mother—Edie? How can I let them down? “My clever daughter, Agnes. Oh, God, what shall I do?”

Wasn’t it enough that I had to hate my work? Must they make me hate myself too?

Unattractive, dreary, tired. . . .

Ought
I to have gone on wearing that old jumper?

But it doesn’t smell. Oh, no, it doesn’t smell!

Am I like that? “It has no voice—but a kind of piping squeak when it is angry.”

I am Agnes Sigglesthwaite. I won a scholarship to Cambridge. Professor Hemingway said I had a distinguished mind.

She touched her withered cheek with anxious explorative fingers. She moved to the looking-glass and gazed at her thin defenceless face, the mild blue eyes, the soft small unformed chin, the pretty mouth undeveloped as a child’s, the long reddened dyspeptic nose. She looked and looked. She could not believe that Agnes Sigglesthwaite, her father’s darling daughter, the brilliant scholar, the beloved respected sister, had come to this.

Oh, no! she moaned. Oh, no!

The landlady turned off the lights in the basement and went to bed. The public-house at the corner closed, and the men tramped home. The last train whistled, leaving the coast for Kingsport. Face downwards on the floor of her dreary room, beneath the white singing light of the incandescent gas, Agnes lay, calling upon her God who had turned His countenance from her, her father, who was dead, and her own fortitude, which had been exhausted. In her room at Maythorpe, watching the slow march of the moon, Midge lay and shuddered. God, I’ve been brave. I’ve proved myself a leader. Let them like me, God, please make me popular.

But Midge slept long before the science mistress. Agnes woke to hear her landlady on the stairs, panting up with the clattering breakfast tray. She crawled to her feet and stood as the door opened.

“Dressed already? Early this morning, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” murmured Agnes.

The hot tea revived her a little. But she felt so strange that she had to sit, clutching the arms of her chair as the room waltzed round her, up and down, swaying sideways, like the golden swans on a merry-go-round.

It was nine o’clock before she rose from the table. She must go to school. She must not be late for prayers. She gathered her books together.

Half-way down the stairs she remembered that she had not washed her face. That was very dirty. She climbed up again panting, but once in her room she could no longer remember why she had returned.

She was late for prayers after all, so went straight through to Form Remove, where she was due to take first period. When the girls filed into the form room, marching demurely, they saw her standing vaguely beside the blackboard, white-faced, red-eyed, her hair in wild disorder.

Members of the A.S.S. glanced at each other. They winked to keep up their spirits.

“Good-morning, Miss Sigglesthwaite.”

“Good-morning, girls. Sit down”—the customary formula.

They sat.

There was a pause. She looked vacantly at them.

Jennifer Howe, form prefect, who was not a member of the A.S.S., said helpfully:

“Shall I give out the notebooks for you, Miss Sigglesthwaite?”

“The notebooks. The nature notebooks.”

Agnes lifted a green-covered book and looked at it. Her voice sounded thick and strange. “Yes. I have read your nature essays. I have also read notices in the cycle shed. We will have a viva-voce examination. Midge Carne!”

Midge sprang to her feet, vibrating with heroic tension.

“What does the A.S.S. stand for?”

“I—I——”

“Nancy!” Pause. “Gwynneth!”

No answer.

“Come here, Midge.”

Midge marched to the desk, swaggering. If she also trembled none knew it—not even herself.

“Is this your work?”

“Yes, Miss Sigglesback.”

It was a slip of the tongue, a trick of nerves. Midge gulped back a snigger.

“You formed the A.S.S.?”

“Yes.”

“You are its president?”

“Yes.”

“You organised this—this” a thin dirty finger trembled on the offending books. The snigger broke from control. Midge began to giggle.

“So you think it’s funny, do you! To persecute someone who never did you harm? To drive me away when I have my living to make? To organise a cruel malicious attack, a—a— Because your father’s a school governor you think you can do what you like. But I tell you, I tell you . . .”

The mumbling furious voice scared Midge out of all sense. Her terrified giggling rose to shrill frightened laughter.

“You laugh now! You dare to laugh at me!”

The science mistress rose from her chair and towered above the child.

“You beast! You little beast!” she hissed, and with the ruler in her hand struck twice at the child’s thin sallow face.

Midge gasped.

Never in her life had any one struck her.

For a moment shock overcame her pain.

Then, as at the second blow, the sharp edge of the ruler caught and cut her delicate skin, she shrank back with a startled cry.

Miss Sigglesthwaite looked down at her handiwork and for the first time she knew what she had done. Her violence had restored her sanity. She became completely calm.

Carefully she laid down the ruler on the blotting-paper, straightening it with meticulous precision.

“Girls,” she said, “get out your botany text books. Turn to
see here
. Start learning the lists that you will find there. Midge, go back to your seat. Jennifer, you are in charge.”

She turned to the door. Jennifer, astonished beyond question, sprang to open it. With a dignity that she had never shown before, Miss Sigglesthwaite left the room and stalked down the passage.

She went straight to Miss Burton’s office and entered. She saw the head mistress seated at her desk.

“Yes? Well, Miss Sigglesthwaite, what is it?”

Sarah was none too pleased at the interruption. The timetable over her desk showed her that Miss Sigglesthwaite should be giving a natural history lesson to Form Remove.

“I wish to hand in my resignation.”

“Your what?”

“My resignation. I am leaving at once. I have hit Midge Carne. I have cut her cheek open.”

“Hit—Midge?”

“I wanted to kill her,” observed Agnes calmly. Then, with a vague gesture. “I don’t—feel—very well.”

She sat down on the chair facing Sarah’s desk and, with a mumbled apology, lost consciousness.

M
OTORISTS
down the Pudsea Buttock road could see a notice-board on a square brick house from which faded letters peeled, proclaiming:

Alfred Ezekiel Huggins

Haulage Contractor, Carrier

The house stood back behind a little garden, tangled with leggy chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies. Beyond it loomed the lichen-mottled roofs of dilapidated stables, sheds and granaries which had belonged to it when it was a farm. To the north, protruding like a pimple from the high wall of the barn, bulged Mrs. Pidney’s cottage. The little Pidneys were always overflowing from their cramped quarters into the more spacious domain of Mr. Huggins, scrambling over shafts, falling off stepladders, hiding themselves in lorries, and nearly driving Mrs. Huggins frantic.

For Mrs. Huggins was a constant sufferer in the same way in which some women are constant readers. She suffered from rheumatism, neuritis, headaches, nervous dyspepsia and the Gentlemen. One gathered from her whispered confidence to refined female friends that the Gentlemen constituted a chronic though mysterious disease, hardly to be mentioned in polite society.

Nellie Huggins would have it known that she had seen better days. Her father had been a schoolmaster and she referred to herself as belonging to the professional classes. This November afternoon she stood at her scullery sink, “just washing out a few trifles,” when the Pidney children erupted over the wall. Mrs. Huggins never had a vulgar washing day. She just “washed out a few things” when she needed them, thus preserving her amateur status as it were, in domestic labour, and constantly bemoaning her maidless condition. Also, for the same reason, while she did housework she always wore a hat—perhaps influenced by the news conveyed in bound volumes of
The Ladies’ Realm
that Edwardian hostesses lunched in theirs to proclaim their occupation’s temporary nature, and to keep their wave in for the evening.

Wearing her hat now she rushed from the back door. “Well, I never! You children! You know you’re not allowed here! Such a mess! Such a noise!”

She might as usefully have rebuked the wind. She watched their animated progress across the hay pile.

“I’ll tell my husband when he comes in!”

It was no use.

Spurling, the man, was out. Alfred was out. The lorry sheds were empty. Mrs. Huggins was left alone to face tradesmen, telephone messages and marauding children.

She retreated into the house, removed her hat and retired into the small stuffy drawing-room.

She would not sit in her kitchen. She was a lady. She lit the lamp, poked ineffectively at the crumbling coal dust in the hearth, and drew the Venetian blind. November evenings closed in early on her.