Almost any job that fully occupied her would have been a relief after the horrible futility of the time of her destitution. But this was more than a mere job; it was—so it seemed to her—a mission, a life-purpose. Trying to awaken the dulled minds of these children, trying to undo the swindle that had been worked upon them in the name of education—that, surely, was something to which she could give herself heart and soul? So for the time being, in the interest of her work, she disregarded the beastliness of living in Mrs. Creevy’s house, and quite forgot her strange, anomalous position and the uncertainty of her future.
IV
But of course, it could not last.
Not many weeks had gone by before the parents began interfering with Dorothy’s programme of work. That—trouble with the parents—is part of the regular routine of life in a private school. All parents are tiresome from a teacher’s point of view, and the parents of children at fourth-rate private schools are utterly impossible. On the one hand, they have only the dimmest idea of what is meant by education; on the other hand, they look on “schooling” exactly as they look on a butcher’s bill or a grocer’s bill, and are perpetually suspicious that they are being cheated. They bombard the teacher with ill-written notes making impossible demands, which they send by hand and which the child reads on the way to school. At the end of the first fortnight Mabel Briggs, one of the most promising girls in the class, brought Dorothy the following note:
“Dear Miss,—Would you please give Mabel a bit more arithmetic? I feel that what your giving her is not practacle enough. All these maps and that. She wants practacle work, not all this fancy stuff. So more arithmetic, please. And remain,
“Yours Faithfully,
“Geo. Briggs.
“PS. Mabel says your talking of starting her on something called decimals. I don’t want her taught decimals, I want her taught arithmetic.”
So Dorothy stopped Mabel’s geography and gave her extra arithmetic instead, whereat Mabel wept. More letters followed. One lady was disturbed to hear that her child was being given Shakespeare to read. “She had heard,” she wrote, “that this Mr. Shakespeare was a writer of stage-plays, and was Miss Millborough quite certain that he wasn’t a very immoral writer? For her own part she had never so much as been to the pictures in her life, let alone to a stage-play, and she felt that even in reading stage-plays there was a very grave danger,” etc., etc. She gave way, however, on being informed that Mr. Shakespeare was dead. This seemed to reassure her. Another parent wanted more attention to his child’s handwriting, and another thought French was a waste of time; and so it went on, until Dorothy’s carefully arranged time-table was almost in ruins. Mrs. Creevy gave her clearly to understand that whatever the parents demanded she must do, or pretend to do. In many cases it was next door to impossible, for it disorganised everything to have one child studying, for instance, arithmetic while the rest of the class were doing history or geography. But in private schools the parent’s word is law. Such schools exist, like shops, by flattering their customers, and if a parent wanted his child taught nothing but cat’s-cradle and the cuneiform alphabet, the teacher would have to agree rather than lose a pupil.
The fact was that the parents were growing perturbed by the tales their children brought home about Dorothy’s methods. They saw no sense whatever in these new-fangled ideas of making plasticine maps and reading poetry, and the old mechanical routine which had so horrified Dorothy struck them as eminently sensible. They became more and more restive, and their letters were peppered with the word “practical,” meaning in effect more handwriting lessons and more arithmetic. And even their notion of arithmetic was limited to addition, subtraction, multiplication and “practice,” with long division thrown in as a spectacular tour de force of no real value. Very few of them could have worked out a sum in decimals themselves, and they were not particularly anxious for their children to be able to do so either.
However, if this had been all, there would probably never have been any serious trouble. The parents would have nagged at Dorothy, as all parents do; but Dorothy would finally have learned—as, again, all teachers finally learn—that if one showed a certain amount of tact one could safely ignore them. But there was one fact that was absolutely certain to lead to trouble, and that was the fact that the parents of all except three children were Nonconformists, whereas Dorothy was an Anglican. It was true that Dorothy had lost her faith—indeed, for two months past, in the press of varying adventures, had hardly thought either of her faith or of its loss. But that made very little difference; Roman or Anglican, Dissenter, Jew, Turk or infidel, you retain the habits of thought that you have been brought up with. Dorothy, born and bred in the precincts of the Church, had no understanding of the Nonconformist mind. With the best will in the world, she could not help doing things that would cause offence to some of the parents.
Almost at the beginning there was a skirmish over the Scripture lessons—twice a week the children used to read a couple of chapters from the Bible. Old Testament and New Testament alternately—several of the parents writing to say, would Miss Millborough please not answer the children when they asked questions about the Virgin Mary; texts about the Virgin Mary were to be passed over in silence, or, if possible, missed out altogether. But it was Shakespeare, that immoral writer, who brought things to a head. The girls had worked their way through Macbeth, pining to know how the witches’ prophecy was to be fulfilled. They reached the closing scenes. Birnam Wood had come to Dunsinane—that part was settled, anyway; now what about the man who was not of woman born? They came to the fatal passage:
Macbeth:“Thou losest labour:
As easy may’st thou the intrenchant air
With they keen sword impress, as make me bleed:
Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests;
I bear a charmed life, which must not yield
To one of woman born.”
Macduff:“Despair thy charm;
And let the angel, whom thou still hast served,
Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb
Untimely ripp’d!”
The girls looked puzzled. There was a momentary silence, and then a chorus of voices round the room:
“Please, Miss, what does that mean?”
Dorothy explained. She explained haltingly and incompletely, with a sudden horrid misgiving—a premonition that this was going to lead to trouble—but still, she did explain. And after that, of course, the fun began.
About half the children in the class went home and asked their parents the meaning of the word “womb.” There was a sudden commotion, a flying to and fro of messages, an electric thrill of horror through fifteen decent Nonconformist homes. That night the parents must have held some kind of conclave, for the following evening, about the time when school ended, a deputation called upon Mrs. Creevy. Dorothy heard them arriving by ones and twos, and guessed what was going to happen. As soon as she had dismissed the children, she heard Mrs. Creevy call sharply down the stairs:
“Come up here a minute, Miss Millborough!”
Dorothy went up, trying to control the trembling of her knees. In the gaunt drawing-room Mrs. Creevy was standing grimly beside the piano, and six parents were sitting round on horsehair chairs like a circle of inquisitors. There was the Mr. Geo. Briggs who had written the letter about Mabel’s arithmetic—he was an alert-looking greengrocer with a dried-up, shrewish wife—and there was a large, buffalo-like man with drooping moustaches and a colourless, peculiarly flat wife who looked as though she had been flattened out by the pressure of some heavy object—her husband,