"We must put younger women in her place."
Rhoda winced as though Miss Cursiter had struck her.
"They will soon grow old. Our profession is a cruel one. It uses up the finest and most perishable parts of a woman's nature. It takes the best years of her life—and throws the rest away."
"Yet thousands of women are willing to take it up, and leave comfortable homes to do it too."
"Yes," sighed Rhoda, "it's the rush for the open door."
"My dear Rhoda, the women's labour market is the same as every other. The best policy is the policy of the open door. Don't you see that the remedy is to open it wider—wider!"
"And when we've opened all the doors as wide as ever they'll go, what then? Where are we going to?"
"I can't tell you." Miss Cursiter looked keenly at her. "Do you mean that you'll go no further unless you know?"
Rhoda was silent.
"There are faults in the system. I can see that as well as you, perhaps better. I am growing old too, Rhoda. But you are youth itself. It is women like you we want—to save us. Are you going to turn your back on us?"
Miss Cursiter bore down on her with her steady gaze, a gaze that was a menace and an appeal, and Rhoda gave a little gasp as if for breath.
"I can't go any farther."
"Do you realize what this means? You are not a deserter from the ranks.It is the second in command going over to the enemy."
The words were cold, but there was a fiery court-martial in Miss Cursiter's eyes that accused and condemned her. If Rhoda had been dashing her head against the barrack walls her deliverance was at hand. It seemed that she could never strike a blow for Miss Quincey without winning the battle for herself.
"I can't help it," said she. "I hate it—I hate the system."
"The system? Suppose you do away with it—do away with every woman's college in the kingdom—have you anything to put in its place?"
"No. I have nothing to put in its place."
"Ah," said Miss Cursiter, "you are older than I thought."
Rhoda smiled. By this time, wrong or right, she was perfectly reckless. If everybody was right in rejecting Miss Quincey, there was rapture in being wildly and wilfully in the wrong. She had flung up the game.
Miss Cursiter saw it. "I was right," said she. "You are under an influence, and a dangerous one."
"Perhaps—but, influence for influence" (here Rhoda returned Miss Cursiter's gaze intrepidly), "I'm not far wrong. I honestly think that if we persist in turning out these intellectual monstrosities we shall hand over worse incompetents than Miss Quincey to the next generation."
Rhoda was intrepid; all the same she reddened as she realized what a mouthpiece she had become for Bastian Cautley's theories and temper.
"My dear Rhoda, you're an intellectual monstrosity yourself."
"I know. And in another twenty years' time they'll want to get rid ofme."
"Of me too," thought the Head. Miss Cursiter felt curiously old and worn. She had invoked Rhoda's youth and it had risen up against her. Influence for influence, her power was dead.
Rhoda had talked at length in the hope of postponing judgment in Miss Quincey's case; now she was anxious to get back to Miss Quincey, to escape judgment in her own.
"And how about Miss Quincey?" she asked.
Miss Cursiter had nothing to say about Miss Quincey. She had done with that section of her subject. She understood that Rhoda had said in effect, "If Miss Quincey goes, I go too." Nevertheless her mind was made up; in tissue paper, all ready for Miss Quincey.
Unfortunately tissue paper is more or less transparent, and Miss Quincey had no difficulty in perceiving the grounds of her dismissal when presented to her in this neat way. Not even when Miss Cursiter said to her, at the close of the interview they had early the next morning, "For your own sake, dear Miss Quincey, I feel we must forego your valuable—most valuable services."
Miss Cursiter hesitated, warned by something in the aspect of the tiny woman who had been a thorn in her side so long. Somehow, for this occasion, the most incompetent, most insignificant member of her staff had contrived to clothe herself with a certain nobility. She was undeniably the more dignified of the two.
The Head, usually so eloquent at great moments, found actual difficulty in getting to the end of her next sentence.
"What I was thinking of—really again entirely for your own sake—was whether it would not be better for you to take a little longer holiday. I do feel in your case the imperative necessity for rest. Indeed if you found that youwishedto retire at the end of the holidays—of course receiving your salary for the term—"
Try as she would to speak as though she were conferring a benefit, the Head had the unmistakable air of asking a favour from her subordinate, of imploring her help in a delicate situation, of putting it to her honour.
Miss Quincey's honour was more than equal to the demand made on it. She had sunk so low in her own eyes lately that she was glad to gain some little foothold for her poor pride. She faced Miss Cursiter bravely with her innocent dim eyes as she answered: "I am ready to go, Miss Cursiter, whenever it is most convenient to you; but I cannot think of taking payment for work I have not done."
"My dear Miss Quincey, the rule is always a term's notice—or if—if any other arrangement is agreed upon, a term's salary. There can be no question—you must really allow me—"
There Miss Cursiter's address failed her and her voice faltered. She had extracted the thorn; but it had worked its way deeper than she knew, and the operation was a painful one. A few compliments on the part of the Head, and the hope that St. Sidwell's would not lose sight of Miss Quincey altogether, and the interview was closed.
It was understood by the end of the morning that Miss Quincey had sent in her resignation. The news spread from class to class—"Miss Quincey is going"—and was received by pupils and teachers with cries of incredulity. After all, Miss Quincey belonged to St. Sidwell's; she was part and parcel of the place; her blood and bones had been built into its very walls, and her removal was not to be contemplated without dismay. Why, what would a procession be like without Miss Quincey to enliven it?
And so, as she went her last round, a score of hands that had never clasped hers in friendship were stretched out over the desks in a wild leave-taking; three girls had tears in their eyes; one, more emotional than the rest, sobbed audibly without shame. The staff were unanimous in their sympathy and regret. Rhoda withdrew hastily from the painful scene. Only the Mad Hatter in her corner made no sign. She seemed to take the news of Miss Quincey's departure with a resigned philosophy.
"Well, little Classical Mistress," said Miss Quincey, "we must say good-bye. You know I'm going."
The child nodded her small head. "Of course you're going. I might have known it. I did know it all along. You were booked to go."
"Why, Laura?" Miss Quincey was mystified and a little hurt.
"Because"—a sinister convulsion passed over the ugly little pariah face—"because"—the Mad Hatter had learnt the force of under-statement—"because Ilikeyou."
At that Miss Quincey broke down. "My dear little girl—I am going becauseI am too old to stay."
"Write to me, dear," she said at the last moment; "let me know how you are getting on."
But she never knew. The Mad Hatter did not write. In fact she never wrote anything again, not even verses. She was handed over next term to Miss Quincey's brilliant and efficient successor, who made her work hard, with the result that the Mad Hatter got ill of a brain fever just before the Christmas holidays and was never fit for any more work; and never became Classical Mistress or anything else in the least distinguished. But this is by the way.
As the College clock struck one, Miss Quincey walked home as usual and went up into her bedroom without a word. She opened a drawer and took from it her Post Office Savings Bank book and looked over her account. There stood to her credit the considerable sum of twenty-seven pounds four shillings and eight pence. No, not quite that, for the blouse, the abominable blouse, had been paid for out of her savings and it had cost a guinea. Twenty-six pounds three shillings and eight pence was all that she had saved in five-and-twenty years. This, with the term's salary which Miss Cursiter had insisted on, was enough to keep her going for a year. And a year is a long time. She came slowly downstairs to the drawing-room where her aunt was dozing and dreaming in her chair. There still hung about her figure the indefinable dignity that had awed Miss Cursiter. If she was afraid of Mrs. Moon she was too proud to show her fear.
"This morning," she said simply, "I received my dismissal."
The old lady looked up dazed, not with the news but with her dream. MissQuincey repeated her statement.
"Do you mean you are not going back to that place there?" she asked mildly.
"I am never going back."
Still with dignity she waited for the burst of feeling she felt to be justifiable in the circumstances. None came; neither anger, nor indignation, nor contempt, not even surprise. In fact the Old Lady was smiling placidly, as she was wont to smile under the spell of the dream.
Slowly, very slowly, it was dawning upon her that the reproach had been taken away from the memory of Tollington Moon. Henceforth his niece Miss Quincey would be a gentlewoman at large. At the same time it struck her that after all poor Juliana did not look so very old.
"Very well then," said she, "if I were you I should put on that nice silk blouse in the evenings."
Dr. Cautley Sends in his Bill
"I wonder," Mrs. Moon observed suddenly one morning, "if that man is going to let his bill run on to the day of judgment?"
The Old Lady had not even distantly alluded to Dr. Cautley for as many as ten months. After the great day of what she called Juliana's "resignation" she seemed to have tacitly agreed that since Juliana had spared her dream she would spare Juliana's. Did she not know, she too, that the dream is the reality? As Miss Quincey, gentlewoman at large, Juliana had a perfect right to set up a dream of her own; as to whether she was able to afford the luxury, Juliana was the best judge. Her present wonder, then, had no malignant reference; it was simply wrung from her by inexorable economy. Juliana's supplies were calculated to last a year; as it was the winter season that they had lately weathered, she was rather more than three-quarters of the way through her slender resources, and it behoved them to look out for bills ahead. And Mrs. Moon had always suspected that young man, not only of a passion for mare's-nesting, but of deliberately and systematically keeping back his accounts that he might revel in a larger haul.
The remark, falling with a shock all the greater for a silence of ten months, had the effect of driving Juliana out of the room. Out of the room and out of the house, down High Street, where Hunter's shop was already blossoming in another spring; up Park Street and past the long wall of St. Sidwell's, till she found herself alone in Primrose Hill Park.
The young day was so glorious that Miss Quincey had some thoughts of climbing Primrose Hill and sitting on the top; but after twenty yards or so of it she abandoned the attempt. For the last few months her heart had been the seat of certain curious sensations, so remarkably like those she had experienced in the summer that she took them for the same, and sternly resolved to suppress their existence by ignoring it. That, she understood, was the right treatment for hysteria.
But this morning Miss Quincey's heart protested so violently against her notion of ascending Primrose Hill, threatening indeed to strangle her if she persisted in it, that Miss Quincey unwillingly gave in and contented herself with a seat in one of the lower walks of the park. There she leaned back and looked about her, but with no permanent interest in one thing more than another.
Presently, as she settled down to quieter breathing, there came to her a strange sensation, that grew till it became an unusually vivid perception of the outer world; a perception mingled with a still stranger double vision, a sense that seemed to be born in the dark of the brain and to be moving there to a foregone conclusion. And all the time her eyes were busy, now with a bush of May in crimson blossom, now with the many-pointed leaves of a sycamore pricked against the blue; now with the straight rectangular paths that made the park an immense mathematical diagram. From where she sat her eyes swept the length of the wide walk that cuts the green from east to west. Far down at the west end was a seat, and she could see two people, a man and a woman, sitting on it; they must have been there a quarter of an hour or more; she had noticed them ever since she came into the park.
They had risen, and her gaze left everything else to follow them; or rather, it went to meet them, for they had turned and were coming slowly eastward now. They had stopped; they were facing each other, and her gaze rested with them, fascinated yet uncertain. And now she could see nothing else; the park, with the regions beyond it and the sky above it, had become merely a setting for one man and one woman; the avenue, fresh strewn with red golden gravel, led up to them and ended there at their feet; a young poplar trembled in the wind and shook its silver green fans above them in delicate confusion. The next minute a light went up in that obscure and prophetic background of her brain; and she saw Rhoda Vivian and Bastian Cautley coming towards her, greeting her, with their kind faces shining.
She rose, turned from them, and went slowly home.
It was the last rent in the veil of illusion that Rhoda had spun so well. Up till then Miss Quincey had seen only half the truth. Now she had seen the whole, with all that Rhoda had disguised and kept hidden from her; the truth that kills or cures.
Miss Quincey did not go out again that day, but sat all afternoon silent in her chair. Towards evening she became talkative and stayed up later than had been her wont since she recovered her freedom. She seemed to be trying to make up to her aunt for a want of sociability in the past.
At eleven she got up and stood before the Old Lady in the attitude of a penitent. Apparently she had been seized with a mysterious impulse of confession.
"Aunt," she said, "there's something I want to say to you."
She paused, casting about in her mind for the sins she had committed.They were three in all.
"I am afraid I have been very extravagant"—she was thinking of the blouse—"and—and very foolish"—she was thinking of Bastian Cautley—"and very selfish"—she was thinking of her momentary desire to die.
"Juliana, if you're worrying about that money"—the Old Lady was thinking of nothing else—"don't. I've plenty for us both. As long as we can keep together I don't care what I eat, nor what I drink, nor what I put on my poor back. And if the worst comes to the worst I'll sell the furniture."
It seemed to Miss Quincey that she had never known her aunt in all those five-and-twenty years; never known her until this minute. For perhaps, after all, being angry with Juliana was only Mrs. Moon's way of being sorry for her. But how was Juliana to know that?
"Only," continued the Old Lady, "I won't part with your uncle's picture.Don't ask me to part with your uncle's picture."
"You won't have to part with anything. I'll—I'll get something to do.I'm not worrying. There's nothing to worry about."
She stooped down and tenderly kissed the wrinkled forehead.
A vague fear clutched at the Old Lady's heart.
"Then, Juliana, you are not well. Hadn't you better see"—she hesitated—pausing with unwonted delicacy for her words—"a doctor?"
"I don't want to see a doctor. There is nothing the matter with me." And still insisting that there was nothing the matter with her, she went to bed.
And old Martha had come with her early morning croak to call Miss Juliana; she had dumped down the hot-water can in the basin with a clash, pulled up the blind with a jerk, and drawn back the curtains with a clatter, before she noticed that Miss Juliana was up all the time. Up and dressed, and sitting in her chair by the hearth, warming her feet at an imaginary fire.
She had been sitting up all night, for her bed was as Martha had left it the night before. Martha approached cautiously, still feeling her way, though there was no need for it, the room being full of light.
She groped like a blind woman for Miss Juliana's forehead, laying her hand there before she looked into her face.
After some fumbling futile experiments with brandy, a looking-glass and a feather, old Martha hid these things carefully out of sight; she disarranged the bed, turning back the clothes as they might have been left by one newly wakened and risen out of it; drew a shawl over the head and shoulders of the figure in the chair; pulled down the blind and closed the curtains till the room was dark again. Then she groped her way out and down the stairs to her mistress's door. There she stayed a moment, gathering her feeble wits together for the part she meant to play. She had made up her mind what she would do.
So she called the Old Lady as usual; said she was afraid there was something the matter with Miss Juliana; thought she might have got up a bit too early and turned faint like.
The Old Lady answered that she would come and see; and the two crept up the stairs, and went groping their way in the dark of the curtained room. Old Martha fumbled a long time with the blind; she drew back the curtains little by little, with infinite precaution letting in the light upon the fearful thing.
But the Old Lady approached it boldly.
"Don't you know me, Jooley dear?" she said, peering into the strange eyes. There was no recognition in them for all their staring.
"Don't knowme, m'm," said Martha soothingly; "seems all of a white swoon, don't she?"
Martha was warming to her part. She made herself busy; she brought hot water bottles and eau de cologne; she spent twenty minutes chafing the hands and forehead and laying warmth to the feet, that the Old Lady might have the comfort of knowing that everything had been done that could be done. She shuffled off to find brandy, as if she had only thought of it that instant; and she played out the play with the looking-glass and the feather.
The feather fluttered to the floor, and Martha ceased bending and peering, and looked at her mistress.
"She's gone, m'm, I do believe."
The Old Lady sank by the chair, her arms clinging to those rigid knees.
"Jooley—Jooley—don't youknowme?" she cried, as if in a passion of affront.
Epilogue.—The Man and the Woman
By daylight there is neither glamour nor beauty in the great burying-ground of North London; you must go to it at evening, in the first fall of the summer dusk, to feel the fascination of that labyrinth of low graves, crosses and headstones, urns and sarcophagi, crowded in the black-green of the grass; of marble columns, granite pyramids and obelisks, massed and reared and piled in the grey of the air. It is nothing if not fantastic. Even by day that same mad grouping and jostling of monumental devices, gathered together from the ends of the world, gives to the place a cheerful half-pagan character; now, in its confusion and immensity, it might be some city of dreams, tossed up in cloud and foam and frozen into marble; some aerial half-way limbo where life slips a little from the living and death from the dead.
For these have their own way here. No priest interferes with them, and whatever secular power ordains these matters is indulgent to its children. If one of them would have his horse or his dog carved on his tomb instead of an angel, or a pair of compasses instead of a cross, there is no one to thwart his fancy. He may even be humorous if he will. It is as if he implored us to laugh with him a little while though the jest be feeble, and not to chill him with so many tears.
At twilight a man and a woman were threading their way through this cemetery, and as they went they smiled faintly at the memorial caprices of the living and the still quainter originalities of the dead. But on the whole they seemed to be trying not to look too happy. They said nothing to each other till they came to a mound raised somewhere in the borderland that divides the graves of the rich from the paupers' ground. There was just room for them to stand together on the boards that roofed in the narrow pit dug ready for the next comer.
"If I believed in a Creator" (it was the man who spoke), "I should want to know what pleasure he found in creating that poor little woman."
The woman did not answer as she looked at him.
"Yet," he went on, "I'm selfish enough to be glad that she lived. If I had not known Miss Quincey, I should not have known you."
"And I," said the woman, and her face was rosy under the touch of grief, "if I had not loved Miss Quincey, I could not have loved you."
They seemed to think Miss Quincey had justified her existence. Perhaps she had.
And the woman took the roses that she wore in her belt and laid them on the breast of the grave. She stood for a minute studying the effect with a shamefaced look, as if she had mocked the dead woman with flowers flung from her wedding-wreath of youth and joy.
Then she turned to the man; the closing bell tolled, and they passed through the iron gates into the ways of the living.