The Youngest Girl in the Fifth (10 page)

"Winnie Gascoyne is charming," confided Miss Douglas to a fellow mistress, "and Lesbia is about the loveliest child I've ever seen. I can't imagine why Gwen should vary from pretty to plain continually. But she does."

Unfortunately, Gwen's temper suffered in exact proportion to her increased inches. She was snappy at school and snarly at home, difficult to please, and ready to take offence at everything. Probably a week's rest in bed, on a feeding diet and a good tonic, was what her tired body and irritable nerves required, but nobody had the hardihood to make such a suggestion. Except in cases of dire necessity, the Gascoynes did not indulge in the luxury of medical advice or chemist's bills, so Gwen perforce did without a doctor, and the medicine he would most undoubtedly have prescribed for her. So far from thinking of rest, she was making plans sufficient to fill five holidays instead of one; even she herself laughed sometimes at the largeness of her projects compared with the brief month in which she was to carry them out.

Meantime the two days of the dramatic performances had arrived. The Seniors always had the first afternoon and the Juniors the second, the audience being composed of the rest of the school together with the mistresses. The outside public was not invited, as the little plays were only intended to be acted among the girls themselves. The Sixth naturally led off, and Gwen quaked as she sat with her Form in front of the heavy red curtains. She was afraid an unpleasant surprise awaited her comrades, and she wondered how they would take it. Exactly what she expected happened. The bell rang, the curtains were drawn aside to reveal--alas, alas, for the Fifth!--a very excellently got up trial scene from the
Merchant of Venice
. Bessie Manners, the head of the school, was a majestic Portia in a handsome scarlet robe; Winnie made an attractive Nerissa; while all the other characters were arrayed in slightly more sumptuous costumes than Elspeth and Hilda had been able to collect.

A shudder of cold horror ran through the unfortunate Fifth, the dramatic representatives of which listened with a kind of fascination to their own speeches, tripped off lightly and easily by their Seniors. It was more particularly galling as all realized that the whole thing was on a rather higher scale than theirs; it was better staged, much prompter, the actions were more appropriate, and the players less stiff and self-conscious, to say nothing of the superior dresses. In gloomy resignation they sat the scene out, and had the magnanimity to applaud heartily at the end. Then came the crisis.

"We can't possibly give the very same thing all over again," whispered Hilda to Elspeth. "We shall just have to announce that ours is 'off'."

Deeply humiliated and disgusted, the Fifth retired to its own classroom to discuss the untoward event.

"It's too sickening--when I'd borrowed the wig on purpose!" wailed Hilda. "You can't think how I had to pester Dad to lend it."

"And my Bassanio doublet and tights were made at a dressmaker's!" lamented Louise Mawson.

"Who'd have thought of the Sixth choosing that very scene?"

"Well, I tried to persuade you to take something else instead," declared Gwen, offering Job's comfort to the disappointed ones.

"Gwen Gascoyne, I verily believe you knew all the time what the Sixth were going to have."

"You must have known when your sister was in it."

"I wasn't sure, but I had an inkling," confessed Gwen.

"Then why didn't you tell?" howled the girls in chorus.

"Why? Because it didn't seem fair. Winnie hadn't said a word--I only guessed. You know we're all supposed to keep our own secrets."

"In this case you ought to have warned us properly. It was too bad to let us rehearse all that time, and get all the costumes together--for this!"

"We've made ourselves ridiculous, and it's your fault entirely."

"Couldn't you act it here, just among ourselves?" suggested Gwen humbly; but her proposal was squashed by an indignant and scornful majority.

"Act it here indeed! Who'd care to do that, I wonder? Don't be so idiotic. You've spoilt our performance, Gwen Gascoyne, when you might have saved it. Why couldn't you stay in the Lower School? You haven't sense enough to be a Senior."

It was not a very satisfactory ending to a first term, even though Gwen had done better in the exams than she expected, so that her place in her new Form was well assured. She still felt an outcast, and as she shut her desk for the last time on breaking-up day, she gave a sigh of intense relief to think that she was going to enjoy a whole month's freedom from the society of her classmates.

Home at present was the
summum bonum
of her wishes. She almost danced along the road from school, and behaved so jubilantly in the bus that Winnie had to interfere, and give her a hint to restrain her hilarity before the other passengers. She rushed into the Parsonage like a cyclone, and flung her satchel under the bookcase.

"There! That's done with! Hurrah! No more horrid, hateful, scrambly, early breakfasts, and tramping off through the mud. Every day's a Saturday, and I'm just going to have a glorious time."

"There's plenty for you to do," said Beatrice, fishing out the satchel and putting it tidily away on Gwen's special shelf. "I haven't finished those texts I was making for the church yet, and--"

"Oh, wow! Don't set me to work too soon! I've a heap of things of my own that want doing first. Winnie is far cleverer at cutting texts than I am."

"She's more to be depended upon, certainly," said Beatrice dryly.

Each member of the family was mysteriously occupied with special secrets. There were still five days before Christmas, time for an energetic person to get through a great deal, and Gwen hoped to accomplish wonders. She was in a sad quandary about her Christmas gifts. Her savings box, which ought to have contained over fifteen shillings, only held a threepennybit and two halfpennies; and she shook her head dismally as she reviewed her pauper condition.

"I must make presents, that's the long and short of it," she told herself. "They can't be handsome ones. And, oh dear! they'll all think me so horribly stingy and mean. Well, they'll have to, for I can't explain! It's absolutely sickening, but it's inevitable."

So Gwen shut herself up in her bedroom, locked out the injured Lesbia, who had plans of her own which she wished to pursue in privacy, put on a thick jacket and a pair of mittens to keep herself warm, and set to work bravely. It is rather hard to make bricks without straw, and her supply of materials, mostly purloined from Beatrice's piece-box, was decidedly scanty. She held a review of the articles when she had finished, and screwed up her face over them in expressive dissatisfaction.

"They're a shabby little lot, that's flat!" she decided.

She turned them over disconsolately--the needle-book for Beatrice, not too tidily sewn; the blotter for Winnie, with its brown paper cover, hastily painted with a spray of roses, and its one sheet of blotting paper begged from Father's writing-table; the pincushion for Lesbia, trimmed with a piece of washed ribbon; and the two postcard albums for Basil and Giles, made out of pieces of cardboard with slits cut in the corners.

"I can afford to spend the threepennybit on Father and Martin," she thought; "but I must leave the halfpennies to rattle in my box, so that it doesn't sound empty."

The village shop did not offer a very large selection of goods for an expenditure of threepence. Gwen was almost at her wits' end what to choose, and finally came away with a cake of oatmeal soap and a large red chalk pencil. Walking back up the village she met Beatrice.

"I've just been to see the Casses," said the latter. "They're in awful trouble. Thomas Cass has sprained his wrist and can't go out in his boat, and Mrs. Cass is in bed with bronchitis. Johnnie's running about with his toes all through his boots, and says he can't come to church or Sunday School because he hasn't another pair."

"Haven't you an old pair of Lesbia's or Stumps's?" suggested Gwen.

"Not one. We sold them all at the Rummage Sale."

"Then he'll have to go barefoot, I suppose."

"I was wondering," said Beatrice tentatively, "if we could manage to get him a pair ourselves. Winnie would give something, I'm sure, and so would I, and so would Father."

Gwen was silent.

"I thought perhaps as you'd rescued him you might feel interested in him, and you'd care--"

Beatrice did not finish the sentence, but looked at her sister hopefully.

Gwen stared at the ground and went very red, but she said nothing, and Beatrice, after waiting a moment, turned away and entered the post office.

"Of all absolute frauds, I feel the meanest!" groaned Gwen. "Beatrice will think me a perfect miser, hoarding up my money and not willing to spend a farthing on anybody! If she only knew the bankruptcy of my box! Was any wretched girl ever in such a fix? Oh! Gwen Gascoyne, you've got yourself into an atrocious mess altogether, and I don't see how you're ever going to climb out of it."

Gwen's one sheet anchor of hope, to which she clung in a kind of desperation, was the thought of the postal orders that Grannie and Aunt Violet almost invariably sent at Christmas. If these did not arrive, she could not pay Netta, and then--well, any kind of catastrophe might be expected to follow. She went about with a load of lead on her heart, and a consequent shortness of temper highly trying to the rest of the family. She was grumpy with the little boys, impatient with Lesbia, and so unaccommodating over doing the decorations in church that Beatrice finally begged her to go home, saying she and Winnie could finish alone.

"You two always want to get rid of me!" flared out Gwen as she stumped defiantly away.

It was not a very happy preparation for Christmas, and Gwen stood rather forlornly in the church porch, her hands in her pockets, watching a few snowflakes that were beginning to fall silently from the heavy grey sky and to whiten the tops of the gravestones and the outlines of the crooked yew trees near the gate. The peace and goodwill that ought to have been present everywhere to-day seemed to have vanished.

"Beatrice was just horrid," thought Gwen, quite oblivious of the fact that the quarrel was of her own making. We are so apt to forget that the world is like a mirror, and if we insist upon frowning into it, it will probably frown back. We sometimes expect other people to do all the forbearing, and then are astonished if our much-tried friends fail in the very point in which we ourselves are so deficient.

"Why, Gwen, what a woebegone face!" exclaimed Father, who hurried in for a moment to speak to the parish clerk. "You'd make a grand model for an artist who wanted to paint a picture of 'Misery'. Are the decorations finished?"

"Almost; at least my part of them."

"Then go home and open that parcel of Parish Magazines you'll find on my study table, and deliver those that belong to the village. You know where to find the list. Be sure to tick the names off. And don't go farther down the road than Marriott's farm; it's getting dark."

Gwen cheered visibly. She was always glad to do something for Father, if it were only distributing Parish Magazines, so she strode off with a swinging step, humming the carol that the school children had been practising with Winnie that afternoon.

"Show us, dear Christ-Child, Thy Christmas light, Teach us the song of the Angels bright, And the love of the Mother blest. And help us this Christmas to learn of Thee All we should do, and all we should be, And how we can please Thee best."

Fortunately the Gascoynes were a forgiving family, and when they all met at tea-time nobody seemed to remember Gwen's ill humour. The evening was a busy one, for there were holly and ivy to be put up in the Parsonage now the church was finished, and the usual mirth over a bough of mistletoe which old Mr. Hodson, who owned the big farm by the mill, always cut off every year from an apple tree in his orchard and brought to them with his own hands. Gwen forgot her troubles and romped with the rest, accepting Martin's sticky kisses in the spirit in which they were intended. The Gascoynes did not hang up their stockings, but laid their presents on the breakfast-table, so that they could have the gratification of opening all their parcels together. It was a point of honour not to take the tiniest peep inside even the most tempting-looking package until the whole family was assembled. Gwen had tried to make up for the poverty of her offerings by the warmth of the greetings she wrote outside, but she did not feel proud of her collection as she carried it downstairs. She was the last, so she hastily made her distribution, and turned to her own plate. She had been well remembered: a book from Father; a nightdress case, beautifully embroidered, from Beatrice; a new purse from Winnie; a big bottle of scent from dear little Lesbia, who to buy it must certainly have gone without the blue-handled penknife she had coveted so much in Bayne's window; some pencils from Giles and Basil; and a piece of indiarubber from Martin, who had compassed seven presents on a capital of eightpence-halfpenny. Gwen looked rather anxiously as the others opened the packets she had addressed to them; but whatever they thought, they all had the niceness to hide their feelings, and thanked her as if she had given them the most expensive objects obtainable.

Father's humour, however, could not help twinkling out at the cake of soap: "To Darling Dad, with dearest and best love, from Gwen".

"I hope it isn't a hint I need washing," he said with mock seriousness.

"I thought you liked oatmeal soap!" protested Gwen, nearly crying.

"So I do, my dear; and I haven't had any for a long time. Like the man in Pears's advertisement, I shall now use no other."

"Here's the postman!" shouted Giles, rushing excitedly to the door, where that much-burdened official, with an extra man to help him, was sorting out what belonged to the Parsonage.

"Six letters for you, Gwen, and two parcels," said Beatrice, assuming command of the correspondence, and distributing it among the eager family.

Gwen snatched her share nervously. Would any of the letters contain the longed-for postal orders? No, they all had halfpenny stamps, and were clearly only Christmas cards.