South Riding (7 page)

She sat, as she moved and spoke, with deliberation. She placed her formidable leather bag on the table before her. Then she looked round at the governors and she smiled.

Her smile was not in the least like those of the other candidates, nervous, ingratiating, chilling or complacent. It was a smile friendly yet challenging. Well, gentlemen, here I am. What next?

“Miss, Miss—er—Burton,” began the chairman. “You’ve been teaching in—er—London.”

He pronounced “London” as though it were an obscure village of whose name he was uncertain.

“At the South London United Secondary School for Girls,” replied Miss Burton. There was hardly a trace of North Country inflection in her pleasant, unexpectedly contralto voice. “I have been there for eight years, the last three of which I was second mistress.”

The chairman had never heard of the South London United. Dr. Dale had. “That’s a very famous centre of education,” he said. “A large school, I believe.”

“Too large. We have seven hundred and forty pupils now.”

“I wonder why you should want to leave it and come to our little town?” smiled the Congregationalist minister.

“Soapy Sam! Our little town indeed!” snorted Mr. Peckover to himself.

“I wanted to come back to Yorkshire.”

“Indeed. Indeed,” sniffed the chairman. “A Yorkshire woman, ha?”

Mrs. Beddows leant forward. “May I ask Miss Burton a question, Mr. Chairman? Miss Burton, we had a much better appointment in the South Riding last winter at Flintonbridge. You didn’t apply for that, I think?”

The candidate faced the alderman with a smile that was not wholly ingenuous. “I didn’t think I should get it,” she replied.

“Indeed?”

The chairman removed, polished, and replaced his
pince-nez;
the Rev. Mr. Dale, Mr. Drew and Mr. Tadman stared at her. Mr. Peckover beamed benignly upon this candidate for headmistress-ship who actually answered questions frankly. The only person, Sarah Burton noted, who appeared entirely indifferent to her, was a large dark sullen man sunk into his chair next Mrs. Beddows. She gathered all eyes but his and held them.

“You see,” she said, with the engaging gesture of one who puts all her cards on the table, “I am very small, and not by birth a lady. My hair is red and I do not look like the sort of person whom most governors want to see reading reports at Speech Day. At the same time . . .”

It was the alderman who saw how, by pleading her smallness, her femininity, she had evoked some masculine sentiment of protective chivalry in the breasts of the other governors. Mrs. Beddows was moved differently.

“Yes, I see,” she said—kindly but with the air of one who stands no nonsense. “Your head mistress at South London gives you quite remarkable testimonials.”

“She was far too generous,” admitted Miss Burton, as well aware as Mrs. Beddows that head mistresses sometimes give glowing references to subordinates whom they desire to see elsewhere. “She’s taught me almost everything I know; but she understands why I want to come north again, and she sympathises with my wish to have a school of my own.”

“Of your own?”

Miss Burton accepted the challenge. “Of which I was the head,” she replied.

“I see.” Mr. Peckover had been waiting with his question. The governors knew that the only thing to be done with their chairman was to take all initiative out of his hands. “I see that you have had overseas experience.”

“Yes. I taught for a little while in a Transvaal High School, and then in a native mission college in the Cape. I meant to go on to Australia, but family reasons brought me back to England.”

“Has—er—any other—governor any questions?” asked the chairman.

Mrs. Beddows had.

“Now then, Miss Burton, you’ve had a very interesting life and met very interesting people. I wonder if you know just what you’ll be in for, in a little out-of-the-way town like this? Some people call Kiplington the last town in England, though of course
we
don’t think so. But it’s no use pretending it’s the hub of the universe. The children here are mostly daughters of small tradesmen and lodging-house keepers, with just a few professional people and clergy. The buildings are not up to much, and I don’t see, with the country in the way it is, that they’ll soon be put right. Now, the point is, can you throw yourself into the kind of work you’ll have to face here? Because if you can’t, it’s not much use your coming. Do you realise, I wonder, how very different it’ll be from what you’re used to?”

Miss Burton shook her head, smiling.

“Less different perhaps than you think. I come from these parts.” As she said, “these parts,” her voice thickened, as though the thought of Kiplington recalled a forgotten dialect.

“Indeed, indeed,” barked the chairman, “and where was that, pray?”

Again it was to Mrs. Beddows that Miss Burton turned.

“Do you remember the blacksmith’s shop at Lipton-Hunter?” she asked.

“Why—yes.”

“Do you remember a red-haired blacksmith there, about forty years ago, who married the district nurse?”

“Why—yes—of course, yes. Let me see. . . . Didn’t the husband . . .?” Then she remembered.

Coming home more drunk than usual one Saturday night, the blacksmith had fallen face downwards into the shallow water-butt in his yard used for cooling irons. His wife, accustomed to his straying from more paths than those of strict sobriety, had not even sought him until the Monday morning. Soon after the inquest, the wife had left the district, taking her children with her.

“They were my parents,” said Miss Burton quietly. “My mother went into the West Riding. She got work there through the kindness of the schoolmaster in Lipton-Hunter. He was splendid to us. It was through him really that I got scholarships later on to Barnsley High School, and then to Leeds and Oxford. I came back from South Africa when my mother’s health failed. She died five years ago.”

“She was a very fine woman,” said Mrs. Beddows. “I remember.”

The governors livened up after that. They asked Miss Burton questions about Yorkshire and teaching methods and social theories; but nothing really interested them half so much as the fact that she had lived at Lipton-Hunter.

Mr. Dale nodded and smiled. She has worked her way up, he thought, even as I did. A good girl.

Mr. Peckover thought of Miss Burton’s scholarships and his daughters’ future. What she had done, they might do.

The chairman, fumbling with his tongue for a bit of gristle caught in a hollow tooth, thought, “Let them get on with it. A blacksmith’s daughter. Good enough for Kiplington.”

Tadman thought, “Like Mrs. Beddows’ darn cheek to talk about small tradesmen’s daughters. What else is she herself but a pig-killing smallholder’s daughter? All the same, this Miss Burton looks a bit of all right. Got some go in her. She’s seen a thing or two outside the four walls of a school. Let’s have her. She may knock a bit of sense into Cissie.”

Mr. Briggs, the solicitor, thought, “She looks like a business woman. If she’s a business woman, we shall get on all right. Miss Holmes never answered her letters. By Jove, Carne looks hard hit. Did he mind not being alderman as much as all that? Or can he be ill?” That unexpected possibility led him to make a quick memo on the paper generously provided for other purposes by the Higher Education Committee. “Carne. Will? See Fretton. Overdraft.”

Mr. Drew felt suspicious. Everything about Miss Burton appeared quite proper, quite decent. Propriety and decency were the virtues which he primarily demanded in all women. Yet. Yet——

He watched Tadman. Tadman was a grocer, a business man, and, in a small cheerful way, a speculator in real estate. Drew, as an estate agent, needed Tadman’s friendship. Kiplington was not such a prosperous place that an estate agent could ignore personal influence. He had decided to vote for Tadman’s candidate.

Alderman Mrs. Beddows had made up her mind. Sarah Burton’s brilliant testimonials and neat business-like appearance represented, she considered, a tribute to her own perspicacity. Thirty years ago she had declared the widowed district nurse of Lipton-Hunter to be a fine woman, and here was her daughter who had developed against all odds into a candidate for headmistress-ship. Didn’t that just show she had good breeding in her somewhere?

Emma Beddows’ face was blithe with satisfaction. This was her choice, her candidate. Not only would Miss Burton be appointed; she would be a success. Emma Beddows would see to it that she was one.

Slumped heavily into his chair beside his friend and ally, Mrs. Beddows,’ Carne of Maythorpe relinquished yet another hope.

He had accepted the governship of the High School, not because he was specially interested in problems of female education, but because Kiplington was in the South Riding, and the Carnes of Maythorpe were the South Riding, and aristocracy dictated a rule of life, and nobility must oblige.

Since he was governor, since periodically he must leave coverts undrawn or men uninterviewed to sit at that inkstained green baize tablecloth and discuss such matters as gas-lighting, lavatories and the place of domestic science in a girls’ curriculum, he might at least find in return some small advantage.

After Midge’s last outburst and that horrible episode in Muriel’s bedroom, Dr. Campbell had advised him: “Get her to school. Get her with other children. Why don’t you send her to the High School? It’s the only thing.”

Carne was not one for definition. During his happy childhood among the places and people and things he loved and trusted, before his mother died and then his father and he met his lovely Muriel and inherited Maythorpe, he had known little need for words. In his unhappy and bewildered manhood, with wave after wave of misfortune breaking over him, he had found small comfort in articulation. Words lacked reality; words were nothing. But Dr. Campbell’s phrase, “It’s the only thing,” chimed like doom in his heart.

Whatever had befallen Muriel, Midge must be spared. He had failed as a husband; as a father he must not fail. That fragile chalice of blue blood in his keeping must be treasured wisely. He must do his best for Midge, who was small and frail and plain and short-sighted and subject to terrifying outbursts of hysteria. He had engaged nurses for her and governesses; he had tried to preserve her from contact with rough boys and epidemics. Now Campbell urged that she should be sent to school—to “make her more like other children—to keep her normal.”

The High School, Carne considered, was definitely low. Tradesmen’s daughters, even one or two labourers’, went there. It was not the school for Lord Sedgmire’s granddaughter.

On the other hand, it was near. Hicks could drive Midge there daily. Wendy Beddows went there and could keep an eye on her. And boarding schools, of the superior type, cost money. He had inquired.

Besides, a new fear haunted Carne now. On that recent evening when, returning from the council meeting at Flintonbridge, disgusted by dirty work about the aldermanship, he had found Midge, a grotesque and terrible image of her mother, screaming and shrinking from him in Muriel’s bedroom, he had been seized, even as he held in his arms her struggling figure, by physical pain so violent, by breathlessness so crippling, that for a few moments he had been completely helpless.

Midge had recovered; but Carne, remembering how his father had died from heart failure, faced a new menace to his beleaguered peace. Supposing that he were to die himself suddenly, in debt as he was, hard pressed as he was, and left the care of poor Muriel and his little Midge to the tender mercies of his brother William? He thought of young William, his architect brother, building houses for West Riding business men near Harrogate; William was clever, had always been the brighter brother; but Carne did not trust him to deal generously with Muriel and could not see him coping successfully with Midge.

If a nice motherly woman could be appointed to the High School, some one gentle and kind, or shrewd and capable like Mrs. Beddows—only a lady—then perhaps she might help him to solve his domestic problem. But none of the candidates had been kind and motherly. Miss Torrence was aggressive, Miss Slaker ineffective, Miss Hammond was cranky, Miss Dry had a hard mouth. As for this blacksmith’s daughter, there was absolutely nothing to be said for her. Clever she might be; but Carne wanted affection, he wanted experience and sympathy and a big motherly bosom on which a little girl could cry comfortably; Midge, he knew all too well, cried a great deal. Miss Burton was neither gentle nor a lady, and her bosom was flat and bony as a boy’s.

Besides, Carne could remember now why he felt he had a grudge against something at Lipton-Hunter.

He looked back into his youth and remembered a grey mare, a pretty creature with dark dappled flanks and a paler belly—a beautiful leaper. Hounds ran once from Minton Riggs to Lipton Bottom and lost their fox in Lipton Sticks. The mare cast a shoe and Carne led her round to the blacksmith’s shop at Lipton-Hunter before riding the twenty odd miles home to Maythorpe. He remembered a red head and grimy face bent over the mare’s foreleg, a smell of beer and a hand fuddled by drink that slipped and drove the hammer home hard on to delicate flesh. The mare reared, the blacksmith fell, Carne cursed and finished the shoeing himself; but the mare’s shin-bone was braised. She never carried him again quite so easily, and fell breaking her back in the Haynes Point to Point eighteen months later. Carne had never forgiven the drunken blacksmith.