OHNMACHT ZUR LUGE IST LANGE NOCH NICHT LIEBE ZUR WAHRHEIT.... WER NICHT LUGEN KANN, WEISS NICHT, WAS WAHRHEIT IST.NIETZSCHE
A pantomime of knowing smiles and interrogatory grimaces greeted her, when, having brushed the cake-crumbs from her mouth, she joined her class. For the twinkling of an eye Laura hesitated, being unprepared. Then, however, as little able as a comic actor to resist pandering to the taste of the public, she yielded to this hunger for spicy happenings, and did what was expected of her: clapped her hands, one over the other, to her breast, and cast her eyes heavenwards. Curiosity and anticipation reached a high pitch; while Laura, by tragically shaking her head, gave it to be understood that no signs could transmit what she had been through, since seeing her friends last.
In the thick of this message she was, unluckily, caught by Dr Pughson, who, after dealing her one of his butcherly gibes, bade her to the blackboard, to grapple with the Seventh Proposition.
The remainder of the forenoon was a tussle with lessons not glanced at since Friday night.—Besides, Laura seldom forestalled events by thinking over them, choosing rather to trust for inspiration to the spur of the moment.
Morning school at an end, she was laid hands on and hurried off to a retired corner of the garden. Here, four friends squatted round, determined to extract her adventures from her—to the last pip.
Laura was in a pretty pickle. Did she tell the plain truth, state the pedestrian facts—and this she would have been capable of doing with some address; for she had looked through her hosts with a perspicacity uncommon in a girl of her age; had once again put to good use those 'sharp, unkind eyes' which Mother deplored. She had seen an overworked, underfed man, who nagged like any woman, and made slaves of two weak, adoring ladies; and she very well knew that, as often as her thoughts in future alighted on Mr. Robby, she would think of him pinching and screwing, with a hawk-like eye on a shadowy bishopric. Of her warm feelings for him, genuine or imaginary, not a speck remained. The first touch of reality had sunk them below her ken, just as a drop of cold water sinks the floating grounds in a coffee-pot ... But did she confess this, confess also that, save for a handful of monosyllables, her only exchange of words with him had been a line of Virgil; and, still more humbling, that she had liked his wife and sister better than himself: did this come to light, she would forfeit every sou of the prestige the visit had lent and yet promised to lend her. And, now that the possible moment for parting with this borrowed support had come, she recognised how greatly she had built on it.
These thoughts whizzed through her mind, as she darted a look at the four predatory faces that hemmed her in. Tilly's was one of them: the lightly mocking smile sat on it that Laura had come to know so well, since her maladroit handling of Bob. She would kill that smile—and if she had to die for it herself.
Still, she must be cautious, wary in picking her steps. Especially as she had not the ghost of an idea how to begin.
Meanwhile cries of impatience buzzed round her.
"She doesn't want to tell."
"Mean brute!"
"Shouldn't wonder if it's too dashed shady."
"Didn't I SAY he was a bad 'un?"
"I bet you there's nothing to tell," said Tilly cockily, and turned up her nose.
"Yes, there is," flung out Laura, at once put on the defensive, and as she spoke she coloured.
"Look at her! Look how red she's got!"
"And after she promised—the sneak!"
"I'm not a sneak. I AM going to tell. But you're all in such a blooming hurry."
"Oh, fire away, slow-coach!"
"Well, girls," began Laura gamely, breathing a little hard.—"But, mind, you must never utter a word of what I'm going to tell you. It's a dead secret, and IF you let on——"
"S' help me God!"
"Ananias and Sapphira!"
"Oh, DO hurry up."
"Well ... well, he's just the most—oh, I don't know how to say it, girls—the MOST——"
"Just scrumptious, I suppose, eh?"
"Just positively scrumptious, and ..."
"And what'd he do?"
"And what about his old sketch of a wife?"
"Her? Oh"—and Laura squeezed herself desperately for the details that WOULD not come—"oh, why she's just a perfect old ... old cat. And twenty years older than him."
"What on earth did he marry her for?"
"Guess he's pretty sick of being tied to an old gin like that?"
"I should say! Perfectly MISERABLE. He can't think now why he let himself be induced to marry her. He just despises her."
"Well, why in the name of all that's holy did he take her?"
Laura cast a mysterious glance round, and lowered her voice. "Well, you see, she had LOTS of money and he had none. He was ever so poor. And she paid for him to be a clergyman."
"Go on! As poor as all that?"
"As poor as a church-mouse.—But, oh," she hastened to add, at the visible cooling-off of the four faces, "he comes of a MOST distinguished family. His father was a lord or a baronet or something like that, but he married a beautiful girl who hadn't a penny against his father's will and so he cut him out of his will."
"I say!"
"Oh, never mind the father."
"Yes. Well, now he feels under an awful obligation to her, and all that sort of thing, you know."
"And she drives it home, I bet. She looks a nipper."
"Is always throwing it in his face."
"What a ghoul!"
"He'd do just ANYTHING to get rid of her, but—Girls, it's a dead secret; you must swear you won't tell."
Gestures of assurance were showered on her.
"Well, he's to be a Bishop some day. It's promised him."
"Holy Moses!"
"And I suppose he can't divorce her, because of that?"
"No, of course not. He'll have to drag her with him like millstone round his neck."
"And he'd twigged right enough you were gone on him?"
Laura's coy smile hinted many things. "I should say so. Since the very first day in church. He said—but I don't like to tell you what he said."
"You must!"
"No. You'll only call me conceited."
"No fear, Kiddy. Out with it!"
"Well, then, he said he saw me as soon as he got in the pulpit, and he wondered ever so much who the girl was with the eyes like sloes, and the skin like ... like cream."
"Snakes-alive-oh! He went it strong."
"And how often were you alone with him?"
"Yes, and if he had met me before he was married—but no, I can't tell any more."
"Oh, don't be such an ass!"
"No, I can't.—Well, I'll whisper it then ... but only to Maria," and leaning over Laura put her lips to Maria's ear.
The reason for this by-stroke she could not have told: the detail she imparted did not differ substantially from those that had gone before.— But by now she was at the end of her tether.
Here, fortunately for Laura, the dinner-bell rang, and the girls had to take to their heels in order to get their books put away before grace. Throughout the meal, from their scattered seats, they exchanged looks of understanding, and their cheeks were pink.
In the afternoon, Laura was again called on to prove her mettle. Her companion on the daily walk was Kate Horner. Kate had been one of the four, and did not lose this chance of beating up fresh particulars.
After those first few awkward moments, however, which had come wellnigh being a fiasco, Laura had no more trouble with her story. Indeed, the plunge once taken, it was astounding how easy it became to make up things about the Shepherds; the difficulty was, to know where to stop. Fictitious details crowded thick and fast upon her—a regular hotchpotch; she had only to stretch out her hand and seize what she needed. It was simpler than the five-times multiplication-table, and did not need to be learnt. But all the same she was not idle: she polished away at her flimflams, bringing them nearer and nearer probability, never, thanks to her sound memory, contradicting herself or making a slip, and always able to begin again from the beginning.
Such initial scepticism as may have lurked in her hearers was soon got the better of. For, crass realists though these young colonials were, and bluntly as they faced facts, they were none the less just as hungry for romance as the most insatiable novel-reader. Romance in any guise was hailed by them, and swallowed uncritically, though it was no more permitted to interfere with the practical conduct of their lives than it is in the case of just that novel-reader, who puts untruth and unreality from him, when he lays his book aside.—Another and weightier reason was, their slower brains could not conceive the possibility of such extraordinarily detailed lying as that to which Laura now subjected them. Its very elaboration stood for its truth.
And the days passed, and Laura had the happiest ideas. A strange thing about them was that they came to her quite unsought, dropping on her like Aladdin's oranges on his turban. All she had to do was to fit them into their niche in her fabrication.
At first, her tale had been chiefly concerned with the internal rift in Mr. Shepherd's home-life, and only in a minor degree with herself. But her public savoured the love-story most, and hence, consulting its taste, as it is the tale-maker's bounden duty to do, Laura was obliged to develop this side of her narrative at the expense of the other. And the more the girls heard, the more they wished to hear. She had early turned Miss Isabella into a staunch ally of her own, in the dissension she had introduced into the curate's household; and one day she arrived at a hasty kiss, stolen in the vestry after evening service, while Mr. Shepherd was taking off his surplice. The puzzle had been, to get herself into the vestry; but, once there, she saw what followed as if it had actually happened. She saw Mr. Shepherd's arm slipped with diffident alacrity round her waist, and her own virtuous recoil; saw Maisie and Isabella waiting, sheep-like, in their pew, till it should please the couple to emerge; saw the form of the verger moving about the darkening church, as he put the lights out, one by one.
But the success this incident brought her turned Laura's head, making her so foolhardy in her inventions that Maria, who for all her boldness of speech was at heart a prude like the rest, grew uneasy.
"You're not to go to that house again, Kiddy. If you do, I'll peach to old Gurley."
Laura ran upstairs to dress for tea, taking two steps at a time. On the top landing, beside the great clothes-baskets, she collided with Chinky, who was coming primly down.
"O ki, John!" she greeted her, being in a vast good-humour. "What do you look so black for?"
"Dunno. Why do you never walk with me nowadays, Laura? I say, you know about that ring? You haven't forgotten?"
"Course not. When am I to get it? It never turns up." Her eyes glittered as she asked, for she foresaw a further link in her chain. "Soon, now?"
Chinky nodded mysteriously. "Pretty soon. And you promise faithfully never to take it off?"
"But it must be a NICE one ... with a red stone in it. And listen, Chink, no one must ever know it was you who gave it me."
"All right, I swear. You're a darling to say you'll wear it," and putting her arm round Laura's shoulders, Chinky gave her a hearty kiss.
This was more than Laura had bargained for;—she freed herself, ungraciously. "Oh, don't!—now mind, a red stone, and for the third finger of the left hand."
"Yes. And Laura, I've thought of something to put inside. SEMPER EADEM ... do you like that, Laura?"
"It'll do.—Look out, there's old Day!" and leaving Chinky standing, she ran down the corridor to her room.
DER VERBRECHER IST HAUFIG GENUG SEINER TAT NICHT GEWACHSEN.NIETZSCHE
For a month or more, Laura fed like a honeybee on the sweets of success. And throve—even to the blindest eye. What had hitherto been lacking was now hers: the admiration and applause of her circle. And never was a child so spurred and uplifted by praise as Laura. Without it, her nature tended to be wary and unproductive; and those in touch with her, had they wished to make the most of her, would no more have stinted with the necessary incentive, that one stints a delicate rose tree in aids to growth. Laura could swallow praise in large doses, without becoming over-sure. Under the present stimulus she sat top in a couple of classes, grew slightly ruddier in face, and much less shrinking in manner.
"Call her back at once and make her shut that door," cried Miss Day thickly, from behind one of the long, dining-hall tables, on which were ranged stacks and piles of clean linen. She had been on early duty since six o'clock.
The pupil-teacher in attendance stepped obediently into the passage; and Laura returned.
"Doors are made to be shut, Laura Rambotham, I'd have you remember that!" fumed Miss Day in the same indistinct voice: she was in the grip of a heavy cold, which had not been improved by the draughts of the hall.
"I'm sorry, Miss Day. I thought I had. I was a little late."
"That's your own lookout," barked the governess.—"Oh, there you are at last, Miss Snodgrass. I'd begun to think you weren't going to appear at all this morning. It's close on a quarter past seven."
"Sorry," said Miss Snodgrass laconically. "My watch must be losing.— Well, I suppose I can begin by marking Laura Rambotham down late.—What on earth are you standing there holding the door for?"
"Miss Day knows—I don't," sauced Laura, and made her escape.
She did not let Miss Snodgrass's bad mark disturb her. No sooner had she begun her practising than she fell to work again on the theme that occupied all her leisure moments, and was threatening to assume the bulk of an early Victorian novel. But she now built at her top-heavy edifice for her own enjoyment; and the usual fate of the robust liar had overtaken her: she was beginning to believe in her own lies. Still she never ventured to relax her critical alertness, her careful surveillance of detail. For, just a day or two before, she had seen a quick flare-up of incredulity light Tilly's face, and oddly enough this had happened when she tried her audience with a fact, a simple little fact, an incident that had really occurred. She had killed the doubt, instantly, by smothering it with a fiction; but she could not forget that it had existed. It has very perplexing; for otherwise her hearers did not shy at a mortal thing; she could drive them where and how she chose.
At the present moment she was planning a great coup: nothing more or less than a frustrated attempt on her virtue. It was almost ready to be submitted to them—for she had read PAMELA with heartfelt interest during the holidays—and only a few connecting links were missing, with which to complete her own case.
Then, without the slightest warning, the blow fell.
It was a Sunday afternoon; the half-hour that preceded Sunday school. Laura, in company with several others, was in the garden, getting her Bible chapter by heart, when Maria called her.
"Laura! Come here. I want to tell you something."
Laura approached, her lips in busy motion. "What's up?"
"I say, chicken, your nose is going to be put out of joint."
"Mine? What do you mean?" queried Laura, and had a faint sense of impending disaster.
"What I say. M. Pidwall's asked to the you-know-who's next Saturday."
"No, she's not!" cried Laura vehemently, and clapped her Bible to.
"S'help me God, she is," asserted Maria.—"Look out, don't set the place on fire."
"How do you know? ... who told you?"
"M. P. herself—Gosh, but you are a jealous little cub. Oh, go on, Kiddy, don't take it like that. I guess he won't give you away."—For Laura was as pale as a moment before she had been scarlet.
Alleging a violent headache, she mounted to her room, and sat down on her bed. She felt stunned, and it took her some time to recover her wits. Sitting on the extreme edge of the bedstead, she stared at [P.181] the objects in the room without seeing them. "M. P.'s going there on Saturday ... M. P.'s going there on Saturday," she repeated stupidly, and, with her hands pressed on her hips, rocked herself to and fro, after the fashion of an older woman in pain.
The fact was too appalling to be faced; her mind postponed it. Instead, she saw the fifty-five at Sunday school—where they were at this minute—drawn up in a line round the walls of the dining-hall. She saw them rise to wail out the hymn; saw Mr. Strachey on his chair in the middle of the floor, perpetually nimming with his left leg. And, as she pictured the familiar scene to herself, she shivered with a sudden sense of isolation: behind each well-known face lurked a possible enemy.
If it had only not been M. P.!—that was the first thought that crystallised. Anyone else! ... from any of the rest she might have hoped for some mercy. But Mary Pidwall was one of those people—there were plenty such—before whom a nature like Laura's was inclined, at the best of times, to shrink away, keenly aware of its own paltriness and ineffectualness. Mary was rectitude in person: and it cannot be denied that, to Laura, this was synonymous with hard, narrow, ungracious. Not quite a prig, though: there was fun in Mary, and life in her; but it was neither fun nor vivacity of a kind that Laura could feel at ease with. Such capers as the elder girl cut were only skin-deep; they were on the surface of her character, had no real roots in her: just as the pieces of music she played on the piano were accidents of the moment, without deeper significance. To Mary, life was already serious, full of duties. She knew just what she wanted, too, where she wanted to go and how to get there; her plans were cut and dried. She was clever, very industrious, the head of several of her classes. Nor was she ever in conflict with the authorities: she moved among the rules of the school as safely as an egg-dancer among his eggs. For the simple reasons that temptations seemed to pass her by. There was, besides, a kind of manly exactness in her habit of thinking and speaking; and it was this trait her companions tried to symbolise, in calling her by the initial letters of her name.
She and Laura, though classmates, had never drawn together. It is true, Mary was sixteen, and, at that time of life, a couple of years dig a wide breach. But there was also another reason. Once, in the innocence of her heart, Laura had let the cat out of the bag that an uncle of hers lived in the up-country township to which Mary belonged.
The girl had eyed her coldly, incredulously. "What? That dreadful man your uncle?" she had exclaimed: she herself was the daughter of a church dignitary. "I should say I did know him—by reputation at least. And it's quite enough, thank you."
Now Laura had understood that Uncle Tom—he needed but a pair of gold earrings to pose as the model for a Spanish Grandee—that Uncle Tom WAS odd, in this way: he sometimes took more to drink than was good for him; but she had never suspected him of being "dreadful", or a byword in Wantabadgery. Colouring to the roots of her hair, she murmured something about him of course not being recognised by the rest of the family; but M. P., she was sure, had never looked on her with the same eyes again.
Such was the rigid young moralist into whose hands her fate was given.
She sat and meditated these things, in spiritless fashion. She would have to confess to her fabrications—that was plain. M. P.'s precise mind would bring back a precise account of how matters stood in the Shepherd household: not by an iota would the truth be swerved from. Why, oh why, had she not foreseen this possibility? What evil spirit had prompted her and led her on?—But, before her brain could contemplate the awful necessity of rising and branding herself as a liar, it sought desperately for a means of escape. For a wink, she even nursed the idea of dragging in a sham man, under the pretence that Mr. Shepherd had been but a blind, used by her to screen some one else. But this yarn, twist it as she might, would not pass muster. Against it was the mass of her accumulated detail.
She sat there, devising scheme after scheme. Not one of them would do.
When, at tea-time, she rose to wash her face before going downstairs, the sole point on which she had come to clearness was, that just seven days lay between her and detection.—Yet after all, she reminded herself, seven days made a week, and a week was a good long time. Perhaps something would happen between now and Saturday. M. P. might have an accident and break her leg, and not be able to go. Or thin, poorly-fed Mr. Shepherd fall ill from overwork.—Oh, how she would rejoice to hear of it!
And, if the worst came to the worst and she HAD to tell, at least it should not be to-day. To-day was Sunday; and people's thoughts were frightfully at liberty. To-morrow they would be engaged again; and, by to-morrow, she herself would have grown more accustomed to the idea.—Besides, how foolish to have been in too great a hurry, should something come to pass that rendered confession needless.
On waking next morning, however, and accounting, with a throb, for the leaden weight on her mind, she felt braver, and quite determined to make a clean breast of her misdoings. Things could not go on like this. But no sooner was she plunged into the routine of the day than her decision slackened: it was impossible to find just the right moment to begin. Early in the morning everyone was busy looking over lessons, and would not thank you for the upset, the dinner-hour was all too short; after school, on the walk, she had a partner who knew nothing about the affair, and after tea she practised.—Hence, on Monday her purpose failed her.
On Tuesday it was the same; the right moment never presented itself.
In bed that night she multiplied the remaining days into hours. They made one hundred and twenty. That heartened her a little; considered thus, the time seemed very much longer; and so she let Wednesday slip by, without over-much worry.
On Thursday she not only failed to own up, but indulged anew.
All the week, as if Mary Pidwall's coming visit worked upon them, the girls had been very greedy for more love-story, and had shown themselves decidedly nettled by Laura's refusal to continue; for this was the week when the great revelation she had hinted at should have been made. And one afternoon when the four were twitting her, and things were looking very black, Laura was incited by some devil to throw them, not, it is true, the savoury incident their mouths watered for, but a fresh fiction—just as the beset traveller throws whatever he has at hand, to the ravenous wolves that press round the sledge. At the moment, the excitement that accompanies inspiration kept her up; but afterwards she had a stinging fit of remorse; and her self-reproaches were every whit as bitter as those of the man who has again broken the moral law he has vowed to respect, and who now sees that he is powerless against recurring temptation.
When she remembered those four rapacious faces, Laura realised that, come what might, she would never have the courage to confess. To them, at least. That night in deep humility she laid her sin bare to God, imploring Him, even though He could not pardon it, to avert the consequences from her.
The last days were also darkened by her belief that M. P. had got wind of her romancings: as, indeed, was quite likely; for the girls' tongues were none too safe. Mary looked at her from time to time with such a sternly suspicious eye that Laura's very stomach quailed within her.
And meanwhile the generous hours had declined to less than half.
"Twice more to get up, and twice to go to bed," she reckoned aloud to herself on Saturday morning.
She was spending that week-end at Godmother's. It was as dull as usual; she had ample leisure to brood over what lay before her. It was now a certainty, fixed, immovable; for, by leaving school that day without having spoken, she had burned her ships behind her. When she went back on Monday M. P. would be there, and every loophole closed. On Sunday evening she made an excuse and went down into the garden. There was no moon; but, overhead, the indigo-blue was a prodigal glitter of stars—myriads of silver eyes that perforated the sky. They sparkled with a cold disregard of the small girl standing under the mulberry tree; but Laura, too, was only half-alive to their magnificence. Her thoughts ran on suicide, on making an end of her blighted career. God was evidently not going to be generous or long-suffering enough to come to her aid; and in imagination she saw the fifty-five gaining on her like a pack of howling hyaenas; saw Mrs. Gurley, Mr. Strachey—Mother. Detection and exposure, she knew it now, were the most awful things the world held. But she had nothing handy: neither a rope, nor poison, nor was there a dam in the neighbourhood.
That night she had the familiar dream that she was being "stood up" and expelled, as Annie Johns had been: thousands of tongues shouted her guilt; she was hunted like a wallaby. She wakened with a scream, and Marina, her bedfellow, rose on one elbow and lighted the candle. Crumpled and dishevelled, Laura lay outside the sheet that should have covered her; and her pillow had slipped to the floor.
"What on earth's the matter? Dreaming? Then depend on it you've eaten something that's disagreed with you."
How she dragged her legs back to school that morning, Laura never knew. At the sight of the great stone building her inner disturbance was such that she was nearly sick. Even the unobservant Marina was forced to a remark.
"You do look a bit peaky. I'm sure your stomach's out of order. Your should take a dose of castor-oil to-night, before you go to bed."
Though it was a blazing November day, her fingers were cold as she took off her hat and changed her white frock. "For the last time," she murmured; by which she meant the last time in untarnished honour. And she folded and hung up her clothes, with a neatness that was foreign to her.
Classes were in full swing when she went downstairs; nothing could happen now till the close of morning school. But Laura signalised the beginning of her downfall, the end of her comet-like flight, by losing her place in one form after another, the lessons she had prepared on Friday evening having gone clean out of her head.
Directly half-past twelve struck, she ran to the top of the garden and hid herself under a tree. There she crouched, her fingers in her ears, her heart thumping as if it would break. Till the dinner-bell rang. Then she was forced to emerge—and no tottering criminal, about to face the scaffold, has ever had more need of Dutch courage than Laura in this moment. Peeping round the corner of the path she saw the fateful group: M. P. the centre of four gesticulating figures. She loitered till they had scattered and disappeared; then with shaking legs crept to the house. At the long tables the girls still stood, waiting for Mr. Strachey; and the instant Laura set foot in the hall, five pairs of eyes caught her, held her, pinned her down, as one pins a butterfly to a board. She was much too far gone to think of tossing her head and braving things out, now that the crisis had come. Pale, guilty, wretched, she sidled to her seat. This was near Maria's, and, as she passed, Maria leant back.
"You VILE little liar!"
"How's that shy little mouse of a girl we had here a month or two ago?" Mr. Shepherd had inquired. "Let me see—what was her name again?"
To which Miss Isabella had replied: "Well, you know, Robby dear, you really hardly saw her. You had so much to do, poor boy, just when she was here. Her name was Laura—Laura Rambotham."
And Mrs. Shepherd gently: "Yes, a nice little girl. But very young for her age. And SO shy."
"You wretched little lying sneak!"
In vain Laura wept and protested.
"You made me do it. I should never have told a word, if it hadn't been for you."
This point of view enraged them. "What? You want to put it on us now, do you? ... you dirty little skunk! To say WE made you tell that pack of lies?—Look here: as long as you stay in this blooming shop, I'll never open my mouth to you again!"
"Someone ought to tell old Gurley and have her expelled. That's all she's fit for. Spreading disgusting stories about people who've been kind to her. They probably only asked her there out of charity. She's as poor as dirt."
"Wants her bottom smacked—that's what I say!"
Thus Maria, and, with her, Kate Horner.
Tilly was cooler and bitterer. "I was a dashed fool ever to believe a word. I might have known her little game. She? Why, when I took her out to see my cousin Bob, she couldn't say bo to a goose. He laughed about her afterwards like anything; said she ought to have come in a perambulator, with a nurse.—YOU make anyone in love with you—you!" And Tilly spat, to show her disdain.
"What have they been saying to you, Laura?" whispered Chinky, pale and frightened. "Whatever is the matter?"
"Mind your own business and go away," sobbed Laura.
"I am, I'm going," said Chinky humbly.—"Oh, Laura, I WISH you had that ring."
"Oh, blow you and your ring! I hate the very name of it," cried Laura, maddened.—And retreating to a lavatory, which was the only private place in the school, she wept her full.
They all, every girl of them, understood white lies, and practised them. They might also have forgiven her a lie of the good, plain, straightforward, thumping order. What they could not forgive, or get over, was the extraordinary circumstantiality of the fictions which with she had gulled them: to be able to invent lies with such proficiency meant that you had been born with a criminal bent.—And as a criminal she was accordingly treated.
Even the grown-up girls heard a garbled version of the story.
"Whyever did you do it?" one of them asked Laura curiously; it was a very pretty girl, called Evelyn, with twinkling brown eyes.
"I don't know," said Laura abjectly; and this was almost true.
"But I say! ... nasty tarradiddles about people who'd been so nice to you? What made you tell them?"
"I don't KNOW. They just came."
The girl's eyes smiled. "Well, I never! Poor little Kiddy," she said as she turned away.
But this was the only kind word Laura heard. For many and many a night after, she cried herself to sleep.
Thus Laura went to Coventry.—Not that the social banishment she now suffered was known by that name. To the majority of the girls Coventry was just a word in the geography book, a place where ribbons were said to be made, and where for a better-read few, some one had hung with grooms and porters on a bridge; this detail, odd to say, making a deeper impression on their young minds than the story of Lady Godiva, which was looked upon merely as a naughty anecdote.
But, by whatever name it was known, Laura's ostracism was complete. She had been sampled, tested, put on one side. And not the softest-hearted could find an excuse for her behaviour.
It was but another instance of how misfortune dogs him who is down, that Chinky should choose this very moment to bring further shame upon her.
On one of the miserable days that were now the rule, when Laura would have liked best to be a rabbit, hid deep in its burrow; as she was going upstairs one afternoon, she met Jacob, the man-of-all-work, coming down. He had a trunk on his shoulder. Throughout the day she had been aware of a subdued excitement among the boarders; they had stood about in groups, talking in low voices—talking about her, she believed, from the glances that were thrown over shoulders at her as she passed. She made herself as small as she could; but when tea-time came, and then [P.192] supper, and Chinky had not appeared at either meal, curiosity got the better of her, and she tried to pump one of the younger girls.
Maria came up while she was speaking, and the child ran away; for the little ones aped their elders in making Laura taboo.
"What, liar? You want to stuff us you don't know why she's gone?" said Maria. "No, thank you, it's not good enough. You can't bamboozle us this time."
"Sapphira up to her tricks again, is she?" threw in the inseparable Kate, who had caught the last words. "No, by dad, we don't tell liars what they know already.—So put that in your pipe and smoke it!"
Only bit by bit did Laura dig out their meaning: then, the horrible truth lay bare. Chinky had been dismissed—privately because she was a boarder—from the school. Her crime was: she had taken half-a-sovereign from the purse of one of her room-mates. When taxed with the theft, she wept that she had not taken it for herself, but to buy a ring for Laura Rambotham; and, with this admission on her lips, she passed out of their lives, leaving Laura, her confederate, behind.—Yes, confederate; for, in the minds of most, liar and thief were synonymous.
Laura had not cared two straws for Chinky; she found what the latter had done, "mean and disgusting", and said so, stormily; but of course was not believed. Usually too proud to defend herself, she here returned to the charge again and again; for the hint of connivance had touched her on the raw. But she strove in vain to prove her innocence: she could not get her enemies to grasp the abysmal difference between merely making up a story about people, and laying hands on others' property; if she could do the one, she was capable of the other; and her companions remained convinced that, if she had not actually had her fingers in some one's purse, she had, by a love of jewellery, incited Chinky to the theft. And so, after a time, Laura gave up the attempt and suffered in silence; and it WAS suffering; for her schoolfellows were cruel with that intolerance, that unimaginative dullness, which makes a woman's cruelty so hard to bear. Laura had to accustom herself to hear every word she said doubted; to hear some one called to, before her face, to attest her statements; to see her room-mates lock up their purses under her very nose.
However, only three weeks had still to run till the Christmas holidays. She drew twenty-one strokes on a sheet of paper, which she pinned to the wall above her bed; and each morning she ran her pencil through a fresh line. She was quite resolved to beg Mother not to send her back to school: if she said she was not getting proper food, that would be enough to put Mother up in arms.
The boxes were being fetched from the lumber-rooms and distributed among their owners, when a letter arrived from Mother saying that the two little boys had sandy blight, and that Laura would not be able to come home under two or three weeks, for fear of infection. These weeks she was to spend, in company with Pin, at a watering-place down the Bay, where one of her aunts had a cottage.
The news was welcome to Laura: she had shrunk from the thought of Mother's searching eye. And at the cottage there would be none of her grown-up relatives to face; only an old housekeeper, who was looking after a party of boys.
Hence, when speech day was over, instead of setting out on an up-country railway journey, Laura, under the escort of Miss Snodgrass, went on board one of the steamers that ploughed the Bay.
"I should say sea-air'll do you good—brighten you up a bit," said the governess affably as they drove: she was in great good-humour at the prospect of losing sight for a time of the fifty-five. "You seem to be always in the dumps nowadays."
Laura dutifully waved her handkerchief from the deck of the SILVER STAR; and the paddles began to churn. As Miss Snodgrass's back retreated down the pier, and the breach between ship and land widened, she settled herself on her seat with a feeling of immense relief. At last—at last she was off. The morning had been a sore trial to her: in all the noisy and effusive leave-taking, she was odd man out; no one had been sorry to part from her; no one had extracted a promise that she would write. Her sole valediction had been a minatory shaft from Maria: if she valued her skin, to learn to stop telling crams before she showed up there again. Now, she was free of them; she would not be humiliated afresh, would not need to stand eye to eye with anyone who knew of her disgrace, for weeks to come; perhaps never again, if Mother agreed. Her heart grew momentarily lighter. And the farther they left Melbourne behind them, the higher her spirits rose.
But then, too, was it possible, on this radiant December day, long to remain in what Miss Snodgrass had called "the dumps"?—The sea was a blue-green mirror, on the surface of which they swam. The sky was a stretched sheet of blue, in which the sun hung a very ball of fire. But the steamer cooled the air as it moved; and none of the white-clad people who, under the stretched white awnings, thronged the deck, felt oppressed by the great heat. In the middle of the deck, a brass band played popular tunes.
At a pretty watering-place where they stopped, Laura rose and crossed to the opposite railing. A number of passengers went ashore, pushing and laughing, but almost as many more came on board, all dressed in white, and with eager, animated faces. Then the boat stood to sea again and sailed past high, grass-grown cliffs, from which a few old cannons, pointing their noses at you, watched over the safety of the Bay—in the event, say, of the Japanese or the Russians entering the Heads past the pretty township, and the beflagged bathing-enclosures on the beach below. They neared the tall, granite lighthouse at the point, with the flagstaff at its side where incoming steamers were signalled; and as soon as they had rounded this corner they were in view of the Heads themselves. From the distant cliffs there ran out, on either side, brown reefs, which made the inrushing water dance and foam, and the entrance to the Bay narrow and dangerous: on one side, there projected the portion of a wreck which had lain there as long as Laura had been in the world. Then, having made a sharp turn to the left, the boat crossed to the opposite coast, and steamed past barrack-like buildings lying asleep in the fierce sunshine of the afternoon; and, in due course, it stopped at Laura's destination.
Old Anne was waiting on the jetty, having hitched the horse to a post: she had driven in, in the 'shandrydan', to meet Laura. For the cottage was not on the front beach, with the hotels and boarding-houses, the fenced-in baths and great gentle slope of yellow sand: it stood in the bush, on the back beach, which gave to the open sea.
Laura took her seat beside the old woman in her linen sunbonnet, the body of the vehicle being packed full of groceries and other stores; and the drive began. Directly they were clear of the township the road as good as ceased, became a mere sandy track, running through a scrub of ti-trees.—And what sand! White, dry, sliding sand, through which the horse shuffled and floundered, in which the wheels sank and stuck. Had one of the many hillocks to be taken, the two on the box-seat instinctively threw their weight forward; old Anne, who had a stripped wattle-bough for a whip, urged and cajoled; and more than once she handed Laura the reins and got down, to give the horse a pull. They had always to be ducking their heads, too, to let the low ti-tree branches sweep over their backs.
About a couple of miles out, the old woman alighted and slipped a rail; and having passed the only other house within cooee, they drove through a paddock, but at a walking-pace, because of the thousands of rabbit-burrows that perforated the ground. Another slip-rail lowered, they drew up at the foot of a steepish hill, beside a sandy little vegetable garden, a shed and a pump. The house was perched on the top of the hill, and directly they sighted it they also saw Pin flying down, her sunbonnet on her neck.
"Laura, Laura! Oh, I AM glad you've come. What a time you've been!"
"Hullo, Pin.—Oh, I say, let me get out first."
"And pull up your bonnet, honey. D'you want to be after gettin' sunstruck?"
Glad though Laura was to see her sister again, she did not manage to infuse a very hearty tone into her greeting; for her first glimpse of Pin had given her a disagreeable shock. It was astonishing, the change the past half-year had worked in the child; and as the two climbed the hill together, to the accompaniment of Pin's bubbly talk, Laura stole look after look at her little sister, in the hope of growing used to what she saw. Pin had never been pretty, but now she was "downright hideous"—as Laura phrased it to herself. Eleven years of age, she had at last begun to grow in earnest: her legs were as of old mere spindleshanks, but nearly twice as long; and her fat little body, perched above them, made one think of a shrivelled-up old man who has run all to paunch. Her face, too, had increased in shapelessness, the features being blurred in the fat mass; her blue eyes were more slit-like than before; and, to cap everything, her fine skin had absolutely no chance, so bespattered was it with freckles. And none of your pretty little sun-kisses; but large, black, irregular freckles that disfigured like moles. Laura felt quite distressed; it outraged her feelings that anyone belonging to her should be so ugly; and as Pin, in happy ignorance of her sister's reflections, chattered on, Laura turned over in her mind what she ought to do. She would have to tell Pin about herself—that was plain: she must break the news to her, in case others should do it, and more cruelly. It was one consolation to know that Pin was not sensitive about her looks; so long as you did not tease her about her legs, there was no limit to what you might say to her: the grieving was all for the onlooker. But not today: this was the first day; and there were pleasanter things to think of. And so, when they had had tea—with condensed milk in it, for the cow had gone dry, and no milkman came out so far—when tea was over—and that was all that could be undertaken in the way of refreshment after the journey; washing your face and hands, for instance, was out of the question; every drop of water had to be carried up the hill from the pump, and old Anne purposely kept the ewers empty by day; if you WOULD wash, you must wash in the sea—as soon, then, as tea was over, the two sisters made for the beach.
The four-roomed, weatherboard cottage, to which at a later date a lean-to had been added, faced the bush: from the verandah there was a wide view of the surrounding country. Between the back of the house and the beach rose a huge sand-hill, sparsely grown with rushes and coarse grass. It took you some twenty minutes to toil over this, and boots and stockings were useless impedimenta; for the sand was once more of that loose and shifting kind in which you sank at times up to the knees, falling back one step for every two you climbed. But then, sand was the prevailing note of this free and easy life: it bestrewed verandah and floors; you carried it in your clothes; the beds were full of it; it even got into the food; and you were soon so accustomed to its presence that you missed the grit of it under foot, or the prickling on your skin, did old Anne happen to take a broom in her hand, or thoroughly re-make the beds.—When, however, on your way to the beach you had laboriously attained the summit of the great dune, the sight that met you almost took your breath away: as far as the eye could reach, the bluest of skies melting into the bluest of seas, which broke its foam-flecked edge against the flat, brown reefs that fringed the shore. Then, downhill—with a trip and a flounder that sent the sand man-high—and at last you were on what Laura and Pin thought the most wonderful beach in the world. What a variety of things was there! Whitest, purest sand, hot to the touch as a zinc roof in summer; rocky caves, and sandy caves hung with crumbly stalactites; at low tide, on the reef, lakes and ponds and rivers deep enough to make it unnecessary for you to go near the ever-angry surf at all; seaweeds that ran through the gamut of colours: brown and green, pearl-pink and coral-pink, to vivid scarlet and orange; shells, beginning with tiny grannies and cowries, and ending with the monsters in which the breakers had left their echo; the bones of cuttlefish, light as paper, and shaped like javelins. And, what was best of all, this beach belonged to them alone; they had not to share its treasures with strangers; except the inhabitants of the cottage, never a soul set foot upon it.
The chief business of the morning was to bathe. If the girls were alone and the tide full, they threw off their clothes and ran into a sandy, shallow pool, where the water never came above their waists, and where it was safe to let the breakers dash over them. But if the tide were low, the boys bathed, too, and then Pin and Laura tied themselves up in old bathing-gowns that were too big for them, and all went in a body to the "Half-Moon Hole". This pool, which was about twenty feet long and ten to fifteen deep, lay far out on the reef, and, at high tide, was hidden beneath surf and foam; at low water, on the other hand, it was like a glass mirror reflecting the sky, and so clear that you could see every weed that waved at the bottom. Having cast off your shoes, you applied your soles gingerly to the prickles of the rock; then plop!—and in you went. Pin often needed a shove from behind, for nowhere, of course, could you get a footing; but Laura swam with the best. Some of the boys would dive to the bottom and bring up weeds and shells, but Laura and Pin kept on the surface of the water; for they had the imaginative dread common to children who know the sea well—the dread of what may lurk beneath the thick, black horrors of seaweed.
Then, after an hour or so in the water, home to dinner, hungry as swagmen, though the bill of fare never varied: it was always rabbit for dinner, crayfish for tea; for the butcher called only once a week, and meat could not be kept an hour without getting flyblown. The rabbits were skinned and in the stew-pot before they were cold; the crayfish died an instant death: one that drove the blood to Laura's head, and made Pin run away and cry, with her fingers to her ears; for she believed the sizzling of the water, as the fish were dropped in, to be the shriek of the creatures in their death-agony.
Except in bathing, the girls saw little of the boys. Both were afraid of guns, so did not go out on the expeditions which supplied the dinner-table; and old Anne would not allow them to join the crayfishing excursions. For these took place by night, off the end of the reef, with nets and torches; and it sometimes happened, if the surf were heavy, that one of the fishers was washed off the rocks, and only hauled up again with considerable difficulty.
Laura took her last peep at the outside world, every evening, in the brief span of time between sunset and dark. Running up to the top of one of the hills, and letting her eyes range over sky and sea, she would drink in the scents that were waking to life after the burning heat of the day: salt water, warmed sand and seaweeds, ti-scrub, sour-grass, and the sturdy berry-bushes, high as her knee, through which she had ploughed her way. That was one of the moments she liked best, that, and lying in bed at night listening to the roar of the surf, which went on and on like a cannonade, even though the hill lay between. It made her flesh crawl, too, in delightful fashion, did she picture to herself how alone she and Pin were, in their room: the boys slept in the lean-to on the other side of the kitchen; old Anne at the back. For miles round, no house broke the solitude of the bush; only a thin wooden partition separated her from possible bushrangers, from the vastness and desolation of the night, the eternal booming of the sea.
Such was the life into which Laura now threw herself heart and soul, forgetting, in the sheer joy of living, her recent tribulation.
But even the purest pleasures WILL pall; and after a time, when the bloom had worn off and the newness and her mind was more at leisure again, she made some disagreeable discoveries which ruffled her tranquillity.
It was Pin, poor, fat, little well-meaning Pin, who did the mischief
Pin was not only changed in looks; her character had changed, too; and in so marked a way that before a week was out the sisters were at loggerheads. Each day made it plainer to Laura that Pin was developing a sturdy independence; she had ceased to look up to Laura as a prodigy of wisdom, and had begun to hold opinions of her own. She was, indeed, even disposed to be critical of her sister; and criticism from this quarter was more than Laura could brook: it was just as if a slave usurped his master's rights. At first speechless with surprise, she ended by losing her temper; the more, because Pin was prone to be mulish, and could not be got to budge, either by derision or by scorn, from her espoused views. They were those of the school at which for the past half-year she had been a day-pupil, and seemed to her unassailable. Laura found them ridiculous, as she did much else about Pin at this time: her ugliness, her setting herself up as an authority: and she jeered unkindly whenever Pin came out with them.—A still more ludicrous thing was that, despite her plainness, Pin actually had an admirer. True, she did not say so outright; perhaps she was not even aware of it; but Laura gathered from her talk that a boy at her school, a boy some three years older than herself, had given her a silk handkerchief and liked to help her with her sums.—And to Laura this was the most knockdown blow of all.
One day it came to an open quarrel between them.
They were lying on the beach after bathing, trying to protect their bare and blistered legs from the sandflies. Laura, flat on her back, had spread a towel over hers; Pin sat Turk—fashion with her legs beneath her and fought the flies with her hands. Having vainly endeavoured to draw from the reticent Laura some of those school-tales of which, in former holidays, she had been so prodigal, Pin was now chattering to her heart's content, about the small doings of home. Laura listened to her with the impatient toleration of one who has seen the world: she really could not be expected to interest herself in such trifles; and she laughed in her sleeve at Pin's simpleness. When, however, her little sister began to enlarge anew on some wonderful orders Mother had lately had, she could not refrain from saying crossly: "You've told me that a dozen times already. And you needn't bawl it out for everyone to hear."
"Oh, Laura! there isn't anyone anywhere near us ... and even if there were—why, I thought you'd be so pleased. Mother's going to give you an extra shilling pocket-money, 'cause of it."
"Of course I'm pleased. Don't be so silly, Pin."
"I'm not ALWAYS silly, Laura," protested Pin. "And I don't believe you ARE glad, a bit. Old Anne was, though. She said: 'Bless her dear heart!'"
"Old Anne? Well, I just wonder what next! It's none of her dashed business."
"Oh, Laura!" began Pin, growing tearful both at words and tone. "Why, Laura, you're not ashamed of it, are you?—that mother does sewing?"—and Pin opened her lobelia-blue eyes to their widest, showing what very big eyes they would be, were they not so often swollen with crying.
"Of course not," said Laura tartly. "But I'm blessed if I can see what it's got to do with old Anne."
"But she asked me ... what mother was working at—and if she'd got any new customers. She just loves mother."
"Like her cheek!" snapped Laura. "Poking her ugly old nose into what doesn't concern her. You should just have said you didn't know."
"But that would have been a story, Laura!" cried Pin, horrified "I did know—quite well."
"Goodness gracious, Pin, you——"
"I've never told a story in my life," said Pin hotly. "And I'm not going to either, for you or anyone. I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself."
"Hold your silly tongue!"
"I shan't, Laura. And I think you're very wicked. You're not a bit like what you used to be. And it's all going to school that's done it—Mother says it is."
"Oh, don't be such a blooming ass!" and Laura, stung to the quick, retaliated by taunting Pin with the change that had come to pass in her appearance. To her surprise, she found Pin grown inordinately touchy about her looks: at Laura's brutal statement of the truth she cried bitterly.
"I'm not, no, I'm not! I haven't got a full moon for a face! It's no fatter than yours. Sarah said last time you were home how fat you were getting."
"I'm sure I'm not," said Laura, indignant in her turn.
"Yes, you are," sobbed Pin. "But you only think other people are ugly, not yourself I'll tell mother what you've said as soon as ever I get home. And I'll tell her, too, you want to make me tell stories. And that I'm sure you've done something naughty at school, 'cause you won't ever talk about it. And how you're always saying bad words like blooming and gosh and golly—yes, I will!"
"You were always a sneak and a tell-tale."
"And you were always a greedy, selfish, deceitful thing."
"You don't know anything about me, you numbskull, you!"
"I don't want to! I know you're a bad, wicked girl."
After this exchange of home truths, they did not speak to each other for two days: Pin had a temper that smouldered, and could not easily forgive. So she stayed at old Anne's side, helping to bake scones and leatherjackets; or trotted after the boys, who had dropped into the way of saying: "Come on, little Pin!" as they never said: "Come on, Laura!" and Laura retired in lonely dudgeon to the beach.
She took the estrangement so much to heart that she eased her feelings by abusing Pin in thought; Pin was a pig-headed little ignoramus, as timid as ever of setting one foot before the other. And the rest of them would be just the same—old stick-in-the muds, unchanged by a hair, or, if they HAD changed, then changed for the worse. Laura had somehow never foreseen the day on which she would find herself out of tune with her home circle; with unthinking assurance she had expected that Pin, for instance, would always be eager to keep pace with her. Now, she saw that her little sister would probably never catch up to her again. Such progress as Pin might make—if she were not already glued firm to her silly notions—would be in quite another direction. For the quarrel had made one thing plain to Laura: with regard to her troubles, she need not look to Pin for sympathy: if Pin talked such gibberish at the hint of putting off an inquisitive old woman, what would she—and not she alone—what would they all say to the tissue of lies Laura had spun round Mr. Shepherd, a holy man, a clergyman, and a personal friend of Mother's into the bargain? She could not blink the fact that, did it come to their ears, they would call her in earnest, what Pin had called her in her temper—bad and wicked. Home was, alas! no longer the snug nest in which she was safe from the slings and shanghais of the world.
And then there was another thing: did she stay at home, she would have to re-live herself into the thousand and one gimcrack concerns, which now, as set forth by Pin, so bored her: the colic Leppie had brought on by eating unripe fruit; the fact that another of Sarah's teeth had dropped out without extraneous aid. It was all very well for a week or two, but, at the idea of shutting herself wholly up with such mopokes, of cutting herself off from her present vital interests, Laura hastily reconsidered her decision to leave school. No: badly as she had suffered at her companions' hands, much as she dreaded returning, it was at school she belonged. All her heart was there: in the doings of her equals, the things that really mattered—who would be promoted, who prefect, whose seat changed in the dining-hall.—Besides, could one who had experienced the iron rule of Mr. Strachey, or Mrs. Gurley, ever be content to go back and just form one of a family of children? She not, at any rate!
Thus she lay, all day long, her hands clasped under her neck, a small white speck on the great wave-lapped beach. She watched the surf break, watched the waves creep up and hide the reef, watched the gulls vanish in the sun-saturated blue overhead. Sometimes she rose to her elbow to follow a ship just inside the horizon; and it pleased her to think that this great boat was sailing off, with a load of lucky mortals, to some unknown, fairer world, while she, a poor Cinderella, had to stop behind—even though she knew it was only the English mail going on to Sydney. Of Pin she preferred not to think; nor could she dwell with equanimity on her late misfortunes at school and the trials that awaited her on her reappearance; and since she HAD to think of something, she fell into the habit of making up might-have-been, of narrating to herself how things would have fallen out had her fictions been fact, her ascetic hero the impetuous lover she had made of him.—In other words, lying prostrate on the sand, Laura went on with her story.
When, towards the end of the third week, she and Pin were summoned to spend some days with Godmother, she had acquired such a gusto for this occupation, that she preferred to shirk reality, and let Pin pay the visit alone.