The Complete Novels Of George Orwell (74 page)

Ringwood House was a dark-looking, semi-detached house of yellow brick, three storeys high, and its lower windows were hidden from the road by ragged and dusty laurels. Above the laurels, on the front of the house, was a board inscribed in faded gold letters:

RINGWOOD HOUSE ACADEMY FOR GIRLS

Ages 5 to 18

Music and Dancing Taught

Apply within for Prospectus

Edge to edge with this board, on the other half of the house, was another board which read:

RUSHINGTON GRANGE HIGH SCHOOL FOR BOYS

Ages 6 to 16

Book-keeping and Commercial Arithmetic a Speciality

Apply within for Prospectus

The district pullulated with small private schools; there were four of them in Brough Road alone. Mrs Creevy, the Principal of Ringwood House, and Mr Boulger, the Principal of Rushington Grange, were in a state of warfare, though their interests in no way clashed with one another. Nobody knew what the feud was about, not even Mrs Creevy or Mr Boulger themselves; it was a feud that they had inherited from earlier proprietors of the two schools. In the mornings after breakfast they would stalk up and down their respective back gardens, beside the very low wall that separated them, pretending not to see one another and grinning with hatred.

Dorothy’s heart sank at the sight of Ringwood House. She had not been expecting anything very magnificent or attractive, but she had expected
something a little better than this mean, gloomy house, not one of whose windows was lighted, though it was after 8 o’clock in the evening. She knocked at the door, and it was opened by a woman, tall and gaunt-looking in the dark hallway, whom Dorothy took for a servant, but who was actually Mrs Creevy herself. Without a word, except to inquire Dorothy’s name, the woman led the way up some dark stairs to a twilit, fireless drawing-room, where she turned up a pinpoint of gas, revealing a black piano, stuffed horsehair chairs, and a few yellowed, ghostly photos on the walls.

Mrs Creevy was a woman somewhere in her forties, lean, hard, and angular, with abrupt decided movements that indicated a strong will and probably a vicious temper. Though she was not in the least dirty or untidy there was something discoloured about her whole appearance, as though she lived all her life in a bad light; and the expression of her mouth, sullen and ill-shaped with the lower lip turned down, recalled that of a toad. She spoke in a sharp, commanding voice, with a bad accent and occasional vulgar turns of speech. You could tell her at a glance for a person who knew exactly what she wanted, and would grasp it as ruthlessly as any machine; not a bully exactly–you could somehow infer from her appearance that she would not take enough interest in you to want to bully you–but a person who would make use of you and then throw you aside with no more compunction than if you had been a worn–out scrubbing-brush.

Mrs Creevy did not waste any words on greetings. She motioned Dorothy to a chair, with the air rather of commanding than of inviting her to sit down, and then sat down herself, with her hands clasped on her skinny forearms.

‘I hope you and me are going to get on well together, Miss Millborough,’ she began in her penetrating, subhectoring voice. (On the advice of Sir Thomas’s everwise solicitor, Dorothy had stuck to the name of Ellen Millborough.) ‘And I hope I’m not going to have the same nasty business with you as I had with my last two assistants. You say you haven’t had an experience of teaching before this?’

‘Not in a school,’ said Dorothy–there had been a tarradiddle in her letter of introduction, to the effect that she had had experience of ‘private teaching’.

Mrs Creevy looked Dorothy over as though wondering whether to induct her into the inner secrets of school-teaching, and then appeared to decide against it.

‘Well, we shall see,’ she said. ‘I must say,’ she added complainingly, ‘it’s not easy to get hold of good hardworking assistants nowadays. You give them good wages and good treatment, and you get no thanks for it. The last one I had–the one I’ve just had to get rid of–Miss Strong, wasn’t so bad so far as the teaching part went; in fact, she was a B.A., and I don’t know what you could have better than a B.A., unless it’s an M.A. You don’t happen to be a B.A. or an M.A., do you, Miss Millborough?’

‘No, I’m afraid not,’ said Dorothy.

‘Well, that’s a pity. It looks so much better on the prospectus if you’ve got a few letters after your name. Well! Perhaps it doesn’t matter. I don’t suppose many of
our
parents’d know what B.A. stands for; and they aren’t so keen on
showing their ignorance. I suppose you can talk French, of course?’

‘Well–I’ve learnt French.’

‘Oh, that’s all right, then. Just so as we can put it on the prospectus. Well, now, to come back to what I was saying, Miss Strong was all right as a teacher, but she didn’t come up to my ideas on what I call the
moral side
. We’re very strong on the moral side at Ringwood House. It’s what counts most with the parents, you’ll find. And the one before Miss Strong, Miss Brewer–well, she had what I call a weak nature. You don’t get on with girls if you’ve got a weak nature. The end of it all was that one morning one little girl crept up to the desk with a box of matches and set fire to Miss Brewer’s skirt. Of course I wasn’t going to keep her after that. In fact I had her out of the house the same afternoon–and I didn’t give her any refs either, I can tell you!’

‘You mean you expelled the girl who did it?’ said Dorothy, mystified.

‘What? The
girl
? Not likely! You don’t suppose I’d go and turn fees away from my door, do you? I mean I got rid of Miss Brewer, not the
girl
. It’s no good having teachers who let the girls get saucy with them. We’ve got twenty-one in the class just at present, and you’ll find they need a strong hand to keep them down.

‘You don’t teach yourself?’ said Dorothy.

‘Oh dear, no!’ said Mrs Creevy almost contemptuously. ‘I’ve got a lot too much on my hands to waste my time
teaching
. There’s the house to look after, and seven of the children stay to dinner–I’ve only a daily woman at present. Besides, it takes me all my time getting the fees out of the parents. After all, the fees
are
what matter, aren’t they?’

‘Yes. I suppose so,’ said Dorothy.

‘Well, we’d better settle about your wages,’ continued Mrs Creevy. ‘In term time I’ll give you your board and lodging and ten shillings a week; in the holidays it’ll just be your board and lodging. You can have the use of the copper in the kitchen for your laundering, and I light the geyser for hot baths every Saturday night; or at least
most
Saturday nights. You can’t have the use of this room we’re in now, because it’s my reception-room, and I don’t want you to go wasting the gas in your bedroom. But you can have the use of the morning-room whenever you want it.’

‘Thank you,’ said Dorothy.

‘Well, I should think that’ll be about all. I expect you’re feeling ready for bed. You’ll have had your supper long ago, of course?’

This was clearly intended to mean that Dorothy was not going to get any food tonight, so she answered Yes, untruthfully, and the conversation was at an end. That was always Mrs Creevy’s way–she never kept you talking an instant longer than was necessary. Her conversation was so very definite, so exactly to the point, that it was not really conversation at all. Rather, it was the skeleton of conversation; like the dialogue in a badly written novel where everyone talks a little too much in character. But indeed, in the proper sense of the word she did not
talk
; she merely said, in her brief shrewish way, whatever it was necessary to say, and then got rid of you as promptly as possible. She now showed Dorothy along the passage to her bedroom, and lighted a gas-jet
no bigger than an acorn, revealing a gaunt bedroom with a narrow white-quilted bed, a rickety wardrobe, one chair and a wash-hand-stand with a frigid white china basin and ewer. It was very like the bedrooms in seaside lodging houses, but it locked the one thing that gives such rooms their air of homeliness and decency–the text over the bed.

‘This is your room,’ Mrs Creevy said; ‘and I just hope you’ll keep it a bit tidier than what Miss Strong used to. And don’t go burning the gas half the night, please, because I can tell what time you turn it off by the crack under the door.’

With this parting salutation she left Dorothy to herself. The room was dismally cold; indeed, the whole house had a damp, chilly feeling, as though fires were rarely lighted in it. Dorothy got into bed as quickly as possible, feeling bed to be the warmest place. On top of the wardrobe, when she was putting her clothes away, she found a cardboard box containing no less than nine empty whisky bottles–relics, presumably, of Miss Strong’s weakness on the
moral side
.

At eight in the morning Dorothy went downstairs and found Mrs Creevy already at breakfast in what she called the ‘morning-room’. This was a smallish room adjoining the kitchen, and it had started life as the scullery; but Mrs Creevy had converted it into the ‘morning-room’ by the simple process of removing the sink and copper into the kitchen. The breakfast table, covered with a cloth of harsh texture, was very large and forbiddingly bare. Up at Mrs Creevy’s end were a tray with a very small teapot and two cups, a plate on which were two leathery fried eggs, and a dish of marmalade; in the middle, just within Dorothy’s reach if she stretched, was a plate of bread and butter; and beside her plate–as though it were the only thing she could be trusted with–a cruet stand with some dried-up, clotted stuff inside the bottles.

‘Good morning, Miss Millborough,’ said Mrs Creevy. ‘It doesn’t matter this morning, as this is the first day, but just remember another time that I want you down here in time to help me get breakfast ready.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Dorothy.

‘I hope you’re fond of fried eggs for your breakfast?’ went on Mrs Creevy.

Dorothy hastened to assure her that she was very fond of fried eggs.

‘Well, that’s a good thing, because you’ll always have to have the same as what I have. So I hope you’re not going to be what I call
dainty
about your food. I always think,’ she added, picking up her knife and fork, ‘that a fried egg tastes a lot better if you cut it well up before you eat it.’

She sliced the two eggs into thin strips, and then served them in such a way that Dorothy received about two-thirds of an egg. With some difficulty Dorothy spun out her fraction of egg so as to make half a dozen mouthfuls of it, and then, when she had taken a slice of bread and butter, she could not help glancing hopefully in the direction of the dish of marmalade. But Mrs Creevy was sitting with her lean left arm–not exactly
round
the marmalade, but in a protective position on its left flank, as though she suspected that Dorothy was going to make an attack upon it. Dorothy’s nerve failed her, and she had no marmalade that morning-nor, indeed, for many mornings to come.

Mrs Creevy did not speak again during breakfast, but presently the sound of feet on the gravel outside, and of squeaky voices in the schoolroom, announced that the girls were beginning to arrive. They came in by a side-door that was left open for them. Mrs Creevy got up from the table and banged the breakfast things together on the tray. She was one of those women who can never move anything without banging it about; she was as full of thumps and raps as a poltergeist. Dorothy carried the tray into the kitchen, and when she returned Mrs Creevy produced a penny notebook from a drawer in the dresser and laid it open on the table.

‘Just take a look at this,’ she said. ‘Here’s a list of the girls’ names that I’ve got ready for you. I shall want you to know the whole lot of them by this evening.’ She wetted her thumb and turned over three pages: ‘Now, do you see these three lists here?’

‘Yes,’ said Dorothy.

‘Well, you’ll just have to learn those three lists by heart, and make sure you know what girls are on which. Because I don’t want you to go thinking that all the girls are to be treated alike. They aren’t–not by a long way, they aren’t. Different girls, different treatment–that’s my system. Now, do you see this lot on the first page?’

‘Yes,’ said Dorothy again.

‘Well, the parents of that lot are what I call the
good
payers. You know what I mean by that? They’re the ones that pay cash on the nail and no jibbing at an extra half-guinea or so now and again. You’re not to smack any of that lot, not on
any
account. This lot over here are the
medium
payers. Their parents do pay up sooner or later, but you don’t get the money out of them without you worry them for it night and day. You can smack that lot if they get saucy, but don’t go and leave a mark their parents can see. If you’ll take
my
advice, the best thing with children is to twist their ears. Have you ever tried that?’

‘No,’ said Dorothy.

‘Well, I find it answers better than anything. It doesn’t leave a mark, and the children can’t bear it. Now these three over here are the
bad
payers. Their fathers are two terms behind already, and I’m thinking of a solicitor’s letter. I don’t care
what
you do to that lot–well, short of a police-court case, naturally. Now, shall I take you in and start you with the girls? You’d better bring that book along with you, and just keep your eye on it all the time so as there’ll be no mistakes.’

They went into the schoolroom. It was a largish room, with grey-papered walls that were made yet greyer by the dullness of the light, for the heavy laurel bushes outside choked the windows, and no direct ray of the sun ever penetrated into the room. There was a teacher’s desk by the empty fireplace, and there were a dozen small double desks, a light blackboard, and, on the mantelpiece, a black clock that looked like a miniature mausoleum; but there were no maps, no pictures, nor even, as far as Dorothy could see, any books. The sole objects in the room that could be called ornamental were two sheets of black paper pinned to the walls, with writing on them in chalk in beautiful copperplate. On one was ‘Speech is Silver. Silence is Golden’, and on the other
‘Punctuality is the Politeness of Princes’.