She turned her head so that her cheek was against its feathers. She knew it would not fly away. Here, nothing you loved ever flew away. She could stay here for a hundred years if she liked, nestled up against this dove. One didn’t talk about years here, any more than one talked about size, because there wasn’t any time, but the language of the world into which she had been born five years ago was beginning to be a part of her now, and was becoming the language of her thought. Once it had not been so. Once she had known a far more wonderful language than the earthly one, but she had forgotten it now, and heard only vague echoes of it in the song of the birds and the sound of the wind blowing. Out in the world she grieved sometimes because she had forgotten it, and could not talk about the things that that language only could express; but perhaps no one would have listened to her if she had because there she was only a child. Here there was no question of being one age or another, young or old, and she had had great wisdom here once, and she believed she had it still, only the more worldly wisdom she acquired there the less she seemed able to remember this country’s wisdom. There, she was sorry about that too sometimes, but here she knew it did not matter. When her life out there was over she would come back here again, like a tired bird returning full circle to its nest. All that she seemed to lose she would find again; only she would be even richer than she had been because she would bring back with her the gathered treasure of her flight to add to the treasure of this heavenly country. But she wouldn’t keep it, for one kept nothing here. One gave it, as the flowers were giving their scent and the dove her warm breast. There was equality here. To give everything was, in this place, the meaning of equality.
She looked down at the dove’s soft feathers and stroked them. When she looked closely at them she saw that they were not grey at all but iridescent with color. It seemed you could not have peace without the other colors too, the praise and joy and courage and all the other lovely tints. They all went to the making of it, and so it was lovelier even than they were. And the light was better still. And the darkness best of all.
“Dear night,” she whispered, and shut her eyes and wriggled closer to the dove. The dove’s eyes too, she knew, were hooded now, and the petals of the flower were closed. The three of them were equal as the darkness held them. But presently the dove would wake and stir, and she would wake too, and the petals would open and make themselves a boat for her, and she would sail away over the grey sea to the far horizons where the mountains were. She had never been to the mountains but she had always known that she would go. Perhaps it would be today. Soon. Now.
“Winkle!”
The dove’s feathers were ruffled and she was not at ease. The flowers were sighing about her, stirred by an alien wind. Their fragrance seemed dying.
“Winkle!”
There were waves on the grey sea, and they were carrying her to a place where she did not want to be.
“Winkle! Come out at once!”
She was in prison, sitting on a hard seat in a small whitewashed cell. She looked up and saw a small square of window, and a flowering branch against the grey sky. A bird was there among the flowers but as she looked it spread its wings and flew away. She was so desolate that she felt she could not bear it.
“Winkle, you are a very naughty little girl! Winkle!”
Winkle’s desolation vanished and she smiled. The words were cross but the voice had the music of her lost country. It was the loveliest voice in the world, with a lilt in it like the taste of honey. Winkle adored honey and she adored the owner of that voice. She literally fell off the housemaid’s box in her haste, picked herself up and bundled across to the door where she was picked up in two plump arms and held against the softness of the angora jumper that clothed the warm breast of a very angry girl. But the anger was not directed against Winkle, of which fact Winkle was well aware as she burrowed in. Miss O’Hara was so soft and warm that she might have been the dove, had it not been for the agitation of her very un-dovelike fury.
“No I won’t, Miss Giles,” stormed Mary O’Hara, her cheeks like poppies, for she had a shocking temper. “Winkle is in my form and if she has been naughty it is my business to punish her, not yours.”
“She was in my form when the incident occurred,” said Miss Giles coldly. She was in a fury too, but a cold fury. The more volcanic Mary became the more glacial and cruelly cutting became Miss Giles. They affected each other like that, and the way they affected each other did nothing to increase the peace of Oaklands.
“Put that child down. You look ridiculous, clutching her as though she were a baby. Put her down. Winkle, come with me.”
Winkle clung like a bur.
“I will punish her, Miss Giles,” promised Mary hotly. “She’s a very naughty little girl.” But her cheek was warm against Winkle’s and her curly red hair was delightfully tickly.
Miss Giles advanced a step, her thin hand outstretched. Mary knew the feel of Miss Giles’s hand, cold and clammy from ill health and to her vivid imagination somehow evil. She would not have it on the child. She swung away with revulsion, set Winkle on her feet and ran, Winkle’s hand in hers. They reached the shelter of Mary’s own little classroom, where she taught the babies, and went in, and Miss Giles heard the key click in the lock as Mary turned it. Their feet had been light as summer rain pattering on leaves as they ran along the passage, and all the light of the grey day had seemed to gather about Mary’s red head and Winkle’s golden one. Gurgles of suppressed merriment had seemed to sparkle, like ripples on water. When they had gone the passage seemed like night. Miss Giles, turning shakily away into her darkness, found that she was crying. Unlike Winkle, she was not aware of any particular beneficence in darkness.
3
As she was not teaching until the next period Mary O’Hara’s classroom was empty of everything except fresh air, daffodils and violets, and six little ink-stained desks. Instinctively, ever since she had come to this school she hated, Mary had fought its queer combined atmosphere of luxurious fugginess and bitter darkness with fresh air, bright colors and cleanliness. Mrs. Belling’s drawing room, facing south, had pink brocade curtains, nearly always a large fire burning, dead flowers in the vases (except when parents were expected) and the windows closed. It was never clean because Annie, Mrs. Belling’s maid, had been with her a great many years and suffered now from that chronic indolence that afflicts those who have been in long service with an indifferent and careless mistress. Miss Giles’s class room looked north and had walls distempered just the wrong shade of buff. The curtains, dragged back from the hard light of the windows as angrily and tightly as Miss Giles’s grey hair from her ravaged face, were a slimy green, that green which is not worthy to be called green at all so much is it the antithesis of freshness. The room was scrupulously clean, for Miss Giles knew how to put the fear of God into Annie, but bare, cold and quite hopeless. In the matter of cleanliness in her room Mary steered a halfway course by letting Annie give it her idea of a cleaning and then cleaning it again when Annie was out of the way, and as Mrs. Belling did not care what anybody did, provided they let her alone, she had distempered the walls sunshine yellow and hung flowered curtains at the eastward-facing windows. She had a little money of her own, and it enabled her to put up such flags of battle in her fight against the opposing forces in this place.
Mary was a born fighter and it was because there was a battle raging here that she stayed, glorying in the fight, every red curl on end with the zest of it, her vitality tingling even to her finger tips whenever she was aware of an inch gained here or there, a slackening of the onslaught of evil. Though that, she thought during wakeful nights, was a melodramatic and ridiculous way of putting it. For what, after all, was wrong here? Mrs. Belling was old, lazy and self-indulgent, and Miss Giles was sick and embittered. That, so far as she knew, was all. Only the laziness of the one and the bitterness of the other seemed somehow a focus for more than themselves. Murkiness seemed
gathered to them as bats and spiders are drawn to the unclean and forgotten corners, and it was this murkiness that was a threat to the children. Mary adored children, and when a battle was for them there was more zest in it than ever.
“Though what do I think I am?” she would ask herself during these same wakeful nights. “A rallying point for the hosts of heaven, or what? Mary O’Hara, you are clean crazy.” But discouragement was not for long and she remained where she was, clean and fresh in her clean fresh room, teaching the children to speak the truth, keeping her temper with difficulty, passionate in sympathy with the truly afflicted, intolerant of malingerers, loyal to superiors she hated and only twenty years old. Like Miss Giles she had not been trained for anything. She had just run wild in Ireland till her parents died and her aunt Mrs. Belling, her father’s sister, had invited her to come and teach at her little school. Without knowing Mrs. Belling, who had left Ireland as a girl and had never returned to it, she had come for the fun of it, for the experience, and was finding it a different sort of fun and experience from anything she had expected.
Sitting in her chair, Winkle standing before her, she held the child lightly between her hands and looked at her. Of the six small girls whom she taught in this room Winkle was her favorite. She was a bunchy little creature, with bright dark eyes and a turned up nose that had earned her the nickname of Winkle, after Mrs. Tiggy Winkle of immortal fame. Her dark eyes were arresting in contrast with her shining straight gold hair, confined by an Alice-in-Wonderland snood. Her forehead was broad and peaceful, and oddly mature above her rosy chubby cheeks. She was nearly always merry and could extract the maximum of amusement out of anything, as Mary could herself. She was brave and tolerant, and the one child in the school who was neither frightened nor repelled by Miss Giles, but merely bored. Yet Mary suffered a pang of fear as she remembered that quite soon now Winkle would leave the east room and its daffodils for the north room and its slimy green curtains. For the first time she questioned her own loyalty. Ought she to let Winkle go to that room? Ought she to bring some definite accusation against Miss Giles? But that would be hateful. Would it be more hateful than letting children suffer?
“You have a new sweater on,” said Winkle.
Mary was thankful to have her attention deflected and for a moment or two she and Winkle were both lost in admiration of her sweater. She had knitted it herself, in blue wool the color of her Irish eyes, and it went beautifully with her brown tweed skirt and newly washed curly red hair. Mary’s dual purpose both as regarding sweater and shampoo had been the sustaining of her courage in a trying situation and the fascination of the dentist. Results had satisfied her. She had seated herself in the chair without a tremor and had had her tooth most tenderly extracted by a young man with a heightened color and a kindling eye, and had known that only professional etiquette, and the condition of her mouth, had prevented her from being asked out to lunch on the spot. Mary liked men only a little less than she liked children and took an entirely healthy delight in the reciprocity of the liking. Untrained though she was she had no anxieties about her future.
“A beautiful blue sweater,” said Winkle. “There wasn’t a blue window today in the cupboard. It was a grey window.”
Mary suddenly remembered why they were here. “Winkle,” she said, “you are a very naughty girl. You mustn’t play games in the broom cupboard during lesson time.”
“I wasn’t playing games,” said Winkle. “I went out through the window to the country.”
“What country?” asked Mary.
“The country,” said Winkle. “You know.” She did not mention her country to grown-ups as a rule because she was not sure that they did know, and one didn’t like to have one’s realities dismissed as idle tales. But Mary was different. Mary was one of those people who made you feel that what you knew they knew too, only better, and where you had been they had been too, only further. Winkle suspected that her father was that kind of person, only she did not know her father very well yet, he seemed a bit high up and remote. But Mary was lower down and more accessible.
“One goes back there,” she said, jogging Mary’s memory.
Mary wrinkled her forehead, trying to remember. The shadow of a memory touched her, filling her with sadness, because she could not quite remember; the same sadness that came sometimes with the scent of violets on a cold spring evening, with birds’ voices, with the sound of rain on a roof in a summer dawn, with a thousand little things that touched you and stabbed you and were gone. A great symphony or a flaming sunset might fill you with intolerable longing, but it was the longing for something to come and had triumph in it. But this sadness was the ache for something that seemed lost.
The source . . .
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple tree.
It seemed to her strange and wonderful that Winkle could find a blue window in this place that always felt to her so profoundly unclean.
“I expect you go back more often at home, Winkle,” she said.
“No, I go back more often here,” said Winkle.
Mary smiled. Why, yes, of course. The frontiers would move closer in a place like this. One was apt to forget that an increase of power upon the one side meant a corresponding increase of power upon the other. What waves of light there must be washing against all the dirty walls of all dark strongholds, what power, gentle, inexorable and undefeatable, an ocean of power and patience. If it was hard to abide its time it should not be hard to trust its power, and Mary’s heart sang within her.
A bell rang.
“That’s drill,” said Winkle, and pulled Mary to the door, for she loved drill. Mary took drill, out of doors by the willow tree when it was fine. The whole school loved drill. They went down the passage together and met Miss Giles coming out of her class room with the rest of the school. Mary noticed that Margary Wentworth was looking as no child should look, and that Miss Giles was looking even worse, but she had no time to do more than wonder briefly what the one had done to the other before Miss Giles was upon her.
“You have punished Henrietta, Miss O’Hara?” Miss Giles disapproved of nicknames. She was the only person at Oaklands who called Winkle Henrietta.
Mary’s very white skin flushed scarlet with mounting anger and shame. Miss Giles had no right to question her in front of the children, yet on the other hand she had told Miss Giles that she would punish Winkle, and she should have at least explained to the child that the other country must be journeyed to in playtime only. The apportioning of different activities to appropriate moments was one of the disciplines of life, and she was not teaching it to Winkle. It must be hard even for the holiest and most disciplined of nuns to leave off praying when the dinner bell rang, and harder still to start praying again after dinner when they didn’t feel that way, but Winkle must learn. And she herself must learn not to commit herself impulsively to a course of action which it might not be advisable afterwards to carry out. She was always doing that. The Irish did.
“Winkle,” she said desperately. “Go to Mrs. Belling.”
“Miss drill?” whispered Winkle, stricken.
“Yes,” whispered Mary, still more stricken. Trying to be fair to Miss Giles she was not now being fair to Winkle. Life was dreadfully difficult. Her hand tightened lovingly and remorsefully on Winkle’s, and then withdrew itself. Winkle sighed, turned and went slowly away. She looked a desolate little object, trailing down the passage towards that hateful room of Mrs. Belling’s, and unaccustomed tears came into Mary’s eyes. “Fool,” she said to herself. “It’s the tooth. The world seems so abominably wicked when a tooth is still in and so dreadfully pathetic when a tooth’s just out. I expect the only really balanced people are the people with dentures.”
“Now come along, children,” she said, and with the tears glittering on her fabulously long eyelashes she reached blindly for Margary’s cold hand and holdi
ng it closely and warmly headed the procession to the garden door.
Miss Giles, left alone, felt bitterly frustrated. Margary had been wrested from her and Henrietta punished quite inadequately. Yet she could not complain. Margary had to be drilled at this hour, and Mrs. Belling had been the only punishment she herself had been able to think of for Patricia on the spur of the moment. The oldest and youngest of the Wentworth children were difficult to punish. Margary, thank heaven, was easier. She went slowly to her room. She must take a couple of aspirins and then lie down, for her head was worse than ever.
Chapter 4
1
Pat was still in the drawing room for Mrs. Belling had asked her to hold her wool for her, and as Mrs. Belling wound very slowly indeed, and had a great deal of wool to wind, they were still at it. Lazy though Mrs. Belling was, she did knit. It was practically the only thing she did do, besides eating and sleeping, and reading a chapter of her Bible every day. And surprisingly, for she was an entirely selfish woman, she knitted for the poor. Like the daily chapter it had been part of the original pose and was now as much a part of Mrs. Belling as her soft white hands and china blue eyes. Mrs. Belling was a very sweet woman and had been a very beautiful one. She had no idea at all that seventy years and the addition of a great deal of weight to her originally slim figure had robbed her of her beauty, and her conviction that she was still lovely enabled her to retain the airs and graces, the self assurance of a consciously lovely woman, and had its effect on those who were with her. They tended to see her as she saw herself and to be as captivated by her as she was captivated by herself. That is, for a short time. To see more of Mrs. Belling was to be less attracted to her. To see a great deal of her was not to be attracted at all. But there were few people who actively disliked her. They merely thought her negligible.