For the first time those prolonged holidays appeared to Claire as a privilege which had its reverse side. Friends in Brussels might possibly house her for two or three weeks; she could not expect, she would not wish them to do more; and at the end there would still remain over three months! It was a new and disagreeable experience to look forward to holidays with dread! For a whole two minutes she looked thoroughly depressed, then her invincible optimism came to the top, and she cried triumphantly—
“I’ll take a holiday engagement!”
The English mistress shook her head.
“That’s fatal! I tried it myself one summer. Went with a family to the seaside, and was expected to play games with the children all day long, and coach them in the evening. I began the term tired out, and nearly collapsed before the end. Teaching is nerve-racking work, and if you don’t get a good spell off, it’s as bad for the pupils as yourself. You snap their heads off for the smallest trifle. Besides, it’s folly to wear oneself out any sooner than one need. It’s bad enough to think of the time when one has to retire. That’s the nightmare which haunts us more and more every year.”
“Don’t you think when the time comes you will be glad to rest?” asked innocent Claire, whereupon Miss Rhodes glared at her with indignant eyes.
“We should be glad to rest, no doubt, but we don’t exactly appreciate the prospect of resting in the workhouse, and it’s difficult to see where else some of us are to go! There is no pension for High School-mistresses, and we are bound to retire at fifty-five—if we can manage to stick it out so long. Fifty-five seems a long way off to you—not quite so long to me; when you reach forty it becomes to feel quite near. Women are horribly long-lived, so the probability is that we’ll live on to eighty or more. Twenty-five years after leaving off work, and—where is the money to come from to keep us? That’s the question which haunts us all when we look into our bank-books and find that, with all our pains, we have only been able to save at the utmost two or three hundred pounds.”
Claire looked scared, but she recovered her composure with a swiftness which her companion had no difficulty in understanding. She pounced upon her with lightning swiftness.
“Ah, you think you’ll get married, and escape that way! We all do when we’re new, and pretty, and ignorant of the life. But it’s fifty to one, my dear, that you won’t? You won’t meet many men, for one thing; and if you do, they don’t like school-mistresses.”
“Doesn’t that depend a good deal on the kind of school-mistress?”
“Absolutely; but after a few years we are all more or less alike. We don’t begin by being dowdy and angular, and dogmatic and prudish; we begin by being pretty and cheerful like you. I used to change my blouse every evening, and put on silk stockings.”
“Don’t you now?”
“I do not! Why should I, to sit over a lodging-house table correcting exercises till ten o’clock? It’s not worth the trouble. Besides, I’m too tired, and it wears out another blouse.”
Claire’s attention was diverted from clothes by the shock of the reference to evening work. She had looked forward to coming home to read an interesting book, or be lazy in whatever fashion appealed to her most, and the corrections of exercises seemed of all things the most dull.
“Shall I have evening work, too?” she inquired blankly, and Miss Rhodes laughed with brutal enjoyment.
“Rather! French compositions on the attributes of a true woman, or, ‘How did you spend your summer holiday?’ with all the tenses wrong, and the idioms translated word for word. And every essay a practical repetition of the one before. It’s not once in a blue moon that one comes across a girl with any originality of thought. Oh, yes! that’s the way we shall spend five evenings a week. You will sit at that side of the table, I will sit at this, and we’ll correct and yawn, and yawn and correct, and drink a cup of cocoa and go to bed at ten. Lively, isn’t it?”
“Awful! I never thought of homework. But if Saturday is a whole holiday there will still be one night off. I shall make a point of doing something exciting every Saturday evening.”
“Exciting things cost money, and, as a rule, when you have paid up the various extras, there’s no money to spare. I stay in bed till ten o’clock on Saturday, and then get up and wash blouses, and do my mending, and have a nap after lunch, and if it’s summer, go and sit on a penny chair in the park, or take a walk over Hampstead Heath. In the evening I read a novel and have a hot bath. Once in a blue moon I have an extravagant bout, and lunch in a restaurant, and go to an entertainment—but I’m sorry afterwards when I count the cost. On Sunday I go to church, and wish some one would ask me to tea. They don’t, you know. They may do once or twice, when you first come up, but you can never ask them back, and your clothes get shabby, and you know nothing about their interests, so they think you a bore, and quietly let you drop.”
A smothered exclamation burst from Claire’s lips; with a sudden, swirling movement she leapt up, and fell on her knees before Miss Rhodes’s chair, her hands clasping its arms, her flushed face upturned with a desperate eagerness.
“Miss Rhodes! we are going to live together here, we are going to share the same room, and the same meals. Would you—if any one offered you a million pounds, would you agree to poison me slowly, day by day, dropping little drops of poison into everything I ate and everything I drank, while you sat by and watched me grow weaker and weaker till I died?”
“Good heavens, girl—are you mad! What in the world are you raving about?”
Miss Rhodes had grown quite red. She was indignant; she was also more than a little scared. The girl’s sudden change of mood was startling in itself, and she looked so tense, so overwhelmingly in earnest. What could she mean? Was it possible that she was a little—touched?
“I suppose you don’t realise it, but it’s insulting even to put such a question.”
“But you are doing it! It’s just exactly what you are beginning already. Ever since I arrived you’ve been poisoning me drop by drop. Poisoning my mind! I am at the beginning of my work, and you’ve been discouraging me, frightening me, painting it all black. Every word that you’ve said has been a drop of poison to kill hope and courage and confidence—and oh, don’t do it! don’t go on! I may be young and foolish, and full of ridiculous ideas, but let me keep them as long as I can! If all that you say is true, they will be knocked out of me soon enough, and I—I’ve never had to work before, or been alone, and—and it’s only two days since my mother left me to go to India—all that long way—and left me behind! It’s hard enough to go on being alone, and believing it’s all going to be couleur de rose, but it will be fifty times harder if I don’t. Please—please don’t make it any worse!”
With the last words tears came with a rush, the tears that had been resolutely restrained throughout the strain of the last week. Claire dropped her head on the nearest resting-place she could find, which happened to be Miss Rhodes’s blue serge lap, and felt the quick pressure of a hand over the glossy coils.
“Poor