She, as teacher, must bring them all as scholars, into subjection. And this she was going to do. All else she would forsake. She had become hard and impersonal, almost avengeful on herself as well as on them, since the stone throwing. She did not want to be a person, to be herself any more, after such humiliation. She would assert herself for mastery, be only teacher. She was set now. She was going to fight and subdue.
She knew by now her enemies in the class. The one she hated most was Williams. He was a sort of defective, not bad enough to be so classed. He could read with fluency, and had plenty of cunning intelligence. But he could not keep still. And he had a kind of sickness very repulsive to a sensitive girl, something cunning and etiolated and degenerate. Once he had thrown an ink-well at her, in one of his mad little rages. Twice he had run home out of class. He was a well-known character.
And he grinned up his sleeve at this girl-teacher, sometimes hanging round her to fawn on her. But this made her dislike him more. He had a kind of leech-like power.
From one of the children she took a supple cane, and this she determined to use when real occasion came. One morning, at composition, she said to the boy Williams:
‘Why have you made this blot?’
‘Please, Miss, it fell off my pen,’ he whined out, in the mocking voice that he was so clever in using. The boys near snorted with laughter. For Williams was an actor, he could tickle the feelings of his hearers subtly. Particularly he could tickle the children with him into ridiculing his teacher, or indeed, any authority of which he was not afraid. He had that peculiar gaol instinct.
‘Then you must stay in and finish another page of composition,’ said the teacher.
This was against her usual sense of justice, and the boy resented it derisively. At twelve o’clock she caught him slinking out.
‘Williams, sit down,’ she said.
And there she sat, and there he sat, alone, opposite to her, on the back desk, looking up at her with his furtive eyes every minute.
‘Please, Miss, I’ve got to go an errand,’ he called out insolently.
‘Bring me your book,’ said Ursula.
The boy came out, flapping his book along the desks. He had not written a line.
‘Go back and do the writing you have to do,’ said Ursula. And she sat at her desk, trying to correct books. She was trembling and upset. And for an hour the miserable boy writhed and grinned in his seat. At the end of that time he had done five lines.
‘As it is so late now,’ said Ursula, ‘you will finish the rest this evening.’
The boy kicked his way insolently down the passage.
The afternoon came again. Williams was there, glancing at her, and her heart beat thick, for she knew it was a fight between them. She watched him.
During the geography lesson, as she was pointing to the map with her cane, the boy continually ducked his whitish head under the desk, and attracted the attention of other boys.
‘Williams,’ she said, gathering her courage, for it was critical now to speak to him, ‘what are you doing?’
He lifted his face, the sore-rimmed eyes half smiling. There was something intrinsically indecent about him. Ursula shrank away.
‘Nothing,’ he replied, feeling a triumph.
‘What are you doing?’ she repeated, her heart-beat suffocating her.
‘Nothing,’ replied the boy, insolently, aggrieved, comic.
‘If I speak to you again, you must go down to Mr Harby,’ she said.
But this boy was a match even for Mr Harby. He was so persistent, so cringing, and flexible, he howled so when he was hurt, that the master hated more the teacher who sent him than he hated the boy himself. For of the boy he was sick of the sight. Which Williams knew. He grinned visibly.
Ursula turned to the map again, to go on with the geography lesson. But there was a little ferment in the class. Williams’ spirit infected them all. She heard a scuffle, and then she trembled inwardly. If they all turned on her this time, she was beaten.
‘Please Miss—’ called a voice in distress.
She turned round. One of the boys she liked was ruefully holding out a torn celluloid collar. She heard the complaint, feeling futile.
‘Go in front, Wright,’ she said.
She was trembling in every fibre. A big, sullen boy, not bad but very difficult, slouched out to the front. She went on with the lesson, aware that Williams was making faces at Wright, and that Wright was grinning behind her. She was afraid. She turned to the map again. And she was afraid.
‘Please Miss, Williams—’ came a sharp cry, and a boy on the back row was standing up, with drawn, pained brows, half a mocking grin on his pain, half real resentment against Williams—‘Please Miss, he’s nipped me,’—and he rubbed his leg ruefully.
‘Come in front, Williams,’ she said.
The rat-like boy sat with his pale smile and did not move.
‘Come in front,’ she repeated, definite now.
‘I shan’t,’ he cried, snarling, rat-like, grinning. Something went click in Ursula’s soul. Her face and eyes set, she went through the class straight. The boy cowered before her glowering, fixed eyes. But she advanced on him, seized him by the arm, and dragged him from his seat. He clung to the form. It was the battle between him and her. Her instinct had suddenly become calm and quick. She jerked him from his grip, and dragged him, struggling and kicking, to the front. He kicked her several times, and clung to the forms as he passed, but she went on. The class was on its feet in excitement. She saw it, but made no move.
She knew if she let go the boy he would dash to the door. Already he had run home once out of her class. So she snatched her cane from the desk, and brought it down on him. He was writhing and kicking. She saw his face beneath her, white, with eyes like the eyes of a fish, stony, yet full of hate and horrible fear. And she loathed him, the hideous writhing thing that was nearly too much for her. In horror lest he should overcome her, and yet at the heart quite calm, she brought down the cane again and again, whilst he struggled making inarticulate noises, and lunging vicious kicks at her. With one hand she managed to hold him, and now and then the cane came down on him. He writhed, like a mad thing. But the pain of the strokes cut through his writhing, vicious, coward’s courage, bit deeper, till at last, with a long whimper that became a yell, he went limp. She let him go, and he rushed at her, his teeth and eyes glinting. There was a second of agonised terror in her heart: he was a beast thing. Then she caught him, and the cane came down on him. A few times, madly, in a frenzy, he lunged and writhed, to kick her. But again the cane broke him, he sank with a howling yell on the floor, and like a beaten beast lay there yelling.
Mr Harby had rushed up towards the end of this performance.
‘What’s the matter?’ he roared.
Ursula felt as if something were going to break in her.
‘I’ve thrashed him,’ she said, her breast heaving, forcing out the words on the last breath. The headmaster stood choked with rage, helpless. She looked at the writhing, howling figure on the floor.
‘Get up,’ she said. The thing writhed away from her. She took a step forward. She had realised the presence of the headmaster for one second, and then she was oblivious of it again.
‘Get up,’ she said. And with a little dart the boy was on his feet. His yelling dropped to a mad blubber. He had been in a frenzy.
‘Go and stand by the radiator,’ she said.
As if mechanically, blubbering, he went.
The headmaster stood robbed of movement or speech. His face was yellow, his hands twitched convulsively. But Ursula stood stiff not far from him. Nothing could touch her now: she was beyond Mr Harby. She was as if violated to death.
The headmaster muttered something, turned, and went down the room, whence, from the far end, he was heard roaring in a mad rage at his own class.
The boy blubbered wildly by the radiator. Ursula looked at the class. There were fifty pale, still faces watching her, a hundred round eyes f
ixed on her in an attentive, expressionless stare.
‘Give out the history readers,’ she said to the monitors.
There was dead silence. As she stood there, she could hear again the ticking of the clock, and the chock of piles of books taken out of the low cupboard. Then came the faint flap of books on the desks. The children passed in silence, their hands working in unison. They were no longer a pack, but each one separated into a silent, closed thing.
‘Take page 125, and read that chapter,’ said Ursula.
There was a click of many books opened. The children found the page, and bent their heads obediently to read. And they read, mechanically.
Ursula, who was trembling violently, went and sat in her high chair. The blubbering of the boy continued. The strident voice of Mr Brunt, the roar of Mr Harby, came muffled through the glass partition. And now and then a pair of eyes rose from the reading-book, rested on her a moment, watchful, as if calculating impersonally, then sank again.
She sat still without moving, her eyes watching the class, unseeing. She was quite still, and weak. She felt that she could not raise her hand from the desk. If she sat there for ever, she felt she could not move again, nor utter a command. It was a quarter past four. She almost dreaded the closing of the school, when she would be alone.
The class began to recover its ease, the tension relaxed. Williams was still crying. Mr Brunt was giving orders for the closing of the lesson. Ursula got down.
‘Take your place, Williams,’ she said.
He dragged his feet across the room, wiping his face on his sleeve. As he sat down, he glanced at her furtively, his eyes still redder. Now he looked like some beaten rat.
At last the children were gone. Mr Harby trod by heavily, without looking her way, or speaking. Mr Brunt hesitated as she was locking her cupboard.
‘If you settle Clarke and Letts in the same way, Miss Brangwen, you’ll be all right,’ he said, his blue eyes glancing down in a strange fellowship, his long nose pointing at her.
‘Shall I?’ she laughed nervously. She did not want anybody to talk to her.
As she went along the street, clattering on the granite pavement, she was aware of boys dodging behind her. Something struck her hand that was carrying her bag, bruising her. As it rolled away she saw that it was a potato. Her hand was hurt, but she gave no sign. Soon she would take the tram.
She was afraid, and strange. It was to her quite strange and ugly, like some dream where she was degraded. She would have died rather than admit it to anybody. She could not look at her swollen hand. Something had broken in her; she had passed a crisis. Williams was beaten, but at a cost.
Feeling too much upset to go home, she rode a little further into the town, and got down from the tram at a small teashop. There, in the dark little place behind the shop, she drank her tea and ate bread-and-butter. She did not taste anything. The taking tea was just a mechanical action, to cover over her existence. There she sat in the dark, obscure little place, without knowing. Only unconsciously she nursed the back of her hand which was bruised.
When finally she took her way home, it was sunset red across the west. She did not know why she was going home. There was nothing for her there. She had, true, only to pretend to be normal. There was nobody she could speak to, nowhere to go for escape. But she must keep on, under this red sunset, alone, knowing the horror in humanity, that would destroy her, and with which she was at war. Yet it had to be so.
In the morning again she must go to school. She got up and went without murmuring even to herself. She was in the hands of some bigger, stronger, coarser will.
School was fairly quiet. But she could feel the class watching her, ready to spring on her. Her instinct was aware of the class instinct to catch her if she were weak. But she kept cold and was guarded.
Williams was absent from school. In the middle of the morning there was a knock at the door: someone wanted the headmaster. Mr Harby went out, heavily, angrily, nervously. He was afraid of irate parents. After a moment in the passage, he came again into school.
‘Sturgess,’ he called to one of his larger boys. ‘Stand in front of the class and write down the name of anyone who speaks. Will you come this way, Miss Brangwen.’
He seemed vindictively to seize upon her.
Ursula followed him, and found in the lobby a thin woman with a whitish skin, not ill-dressed in a grey costume and a purple hat.
‘I called about Vernon,’ said the woman, speaking in a refined accent. There was about the woman altogether an appearance of refinement and of cleanliness, curiously contradicted by her half beggar’s deportment, and a sense of her being unpleasant to touch, like something going bad inside. She was neither a lady nor an ordinary working man’s wife, but a creature separate from society. By her dress she was not poor.
Ursula knew at once that she was Williams’ mother, and that he was Vernon. She remembered that he was always clean, and well-dressed, in a sailor suit. And he had this same peculiar, half transparent unwholesomeness, rather like a corpse.
‘I wasn’t able to send him to school to-day,’ continued the woman, with a false grace of manner. ‘He came home last night so ill—he was violently sick—I thought I should have to send for the doctor—You know he has a weak heart.’
The woman looked at Ursula with her pale, dead eyes.
‘No,’ replied the girl, ‘I did not know.’
She stood still with repulsion and uncertainty. Mr Harby, large and male, with his overhanging moustache, stood by with a slight, ugly smile at the corner of his eyes. The woman went on insidiously, not quite human:
‘Oh yes, he has had heart disease ever since he was a child. That is why he isn’t very regular at school. And it is very bad to beat him. He was awfully ill this morning—I shall call on the doctor as I go back.’
‘Who is staying with him now, then?’ put in the deep voice of the schoolmaster, cunningly.
‘Oh, I left him with a woman who comes in to help me—and who understands him. But I shall call in the doctor on my way home.’
Ursula stood still. She felt vague threats in all this. But the woman was so utterly strange to her, that she did not understand.
‘He told me he had been beaten,’ continued the woman, ‘and when I undressed him to put him to bed, his body was covered with marks—I could show them to any doctor.’
Mr Harby looked at Ursula to answer. She began to understand. The woman was threatening to take out a charge of assault on her son against her. Perhaps she wanted money.
‘I caned him,’ she said. ‘He was so much trouble.’
‘I’m sorry if he was troublesome,’ said the woman, ‘but he must have been shamefully beaten. I could show the marks to any doctor. I’m sure it isn’t allowed, if it was known.’
‘I caned him while he kept kicking me,’ said Ursula, getting angry because she was half excusing herself, Mr Harby standing there with the twinkle at the side of his eyes, enjoying the dilemma of the two women.
‘I’m sure I’m sorry if he behaved badly,’ said the woman. ‘But I can’t think he deserved treating as he has been. I can’t send him to school, and really can’t afford to pay the doctor.—Is it allowed for the teachers to beat the children like that, Mr Harby?’
The headmaster refused to answer. Ursula loathed herself, and loathed Mr Harby with his twinkling cunning and malice on the occasion. The other miserable woman watched her chance.
‘It is an expense to me, and I have a great struggle to keep my boy decent.’
Ursula still would not answer. She looked out at the asphalt yard, where a dirty rag of paper was blowing.
‘And it isn’t allowed to beat a child like that, I am sure, especially when he is delicate.’
Ursula stared with a set face on the yard, as if she did not hear. She loathed all this, and had ceased to feel or to exist.
‘Though I know he is troublesome sometimes—but I think it was too much. His body is covered with marks.’
Mr Harby stood sturdy and unmoved, waiting now to have done, with the twinkling, tiny wrinkles of an ironical smile at the corners of his eyes. He felt himself master of the situation.
‘And he was violently sick. I couldn’t possibly send him to school to-day. He couldn’t keep his head up.’
Yet she had no answer.
‘You will understand, Sir, why he is absent,’ she said, turning to Mr Harby.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, rough and off-hand. Ursula detested him for his male triumph. And she loathed the woman. She loathed everything.
‘You will try to have it remembered, Sir, that he has a weak heart. He is so sick after these things.’
‘Yes,’ said the headmaster, ‘I’ll see about it.’
‘I know he is troublesome,’ the woman only addressed herself to the male now—‘but if you could have him punished without beating—he is really delicate.’
Ursula was beginning to feel upset. Harby stood in rather superb mastery, the woman cringing to him to tickle him as one tickles trout.
‘I had come to explain why he was away this morning, Sir. You will understand.’
She held out her hand. Harby took it and let it go, surprised and angry.
‘Good morning,’ she said, and she gave her gloved, seedy hand to Ursula. She was not ill-looking, and had a curious insinuating way, very distasteful yet effective.
‘Good morning, Mr Harby, and thank you.’
The figure in the grey costume and the purple hat was going across the school yard with a curious lingering walk. Ursula felt a strange pity for her, and revulsion from her. She shuddered. She went into the school again.
The next morning Williams turned up, looking paler than ever, very neat and nicely dressed in his sailor blouse. He glanced at Ursula with a half-smile: cunning, subdued, ready to do as she told him. There was something about him that made her shiver. She loathed the idea of having laid hands on him. His elder brother was standing outside the gate at playtime, a youth of about fifteen, tall and thin and pale. He raised his hat, almost like a gentleman. But there was something subdued, insidious about him too.