“Well, we shall see,” she said. “I must say,” she added complainingly, “it’s not easy to get hold of good hardworking assistants nowadays. You give them good wages and good treatment, and you get no thanks for it. The last one I had—the one I’ve just had to get rid of—Miss Strong, wasn’t so bad so far as the teaching part went; in fact, she was a B.A., and I don’t know what you could have better than a B.A., unless it’s an M.A. You don’t happen to be a B.A. or an M.A., do you, Miss Millborough?”
“No, I’m afraid not,” said Dorothy.
“Well, that’s a pity. It looks so much better on the prospectus if you’ve got a few letters after your name. Well! Perhaps it doesn’t matter. I don’t suppose many of our parents’d know what B.A. stands for; and they aren’t so keen on showing their ignorance. I suppose you can talk French, of course?”
“Well—I’ve learnt French.”
“Oh, that’s all right, then. Just so as we can put it on the prospectus. Well, now, to come back to what I was saying, Miss Strong was all right as a teacher, but she didn’t come up to my ideas on what I call the moral side. We’re very strong on the moral side at Ringwood House. It’s what counts most with the parents, you’ll find. And the one before Miss Strong, Miss Brewer—well, she had what I call a weak nature. You don’t get on with girls if you’ve got a weak nature. The end of it all was that one morning one little girl crept up to the desk with a box of matches and set fire to Miss Brewer’s skirt. Of course I wasn’t going to keep her after that. In fact I had her out of the house the same afternoon—and I didn’t give her any refs either, I can tell you!”
“You mean you expelled the girl who did it?” said Dorothy, mystified.
“What? The girl? Not likely! You don’t suppose I’d go and turn fees away from my door, do you? I mean I got rid of Miss Brewer, not the girl. It’s no good having teachers who let the girls get saucy with them. We’ve got twenty-one in the class just at present, and you’ll find they need a strong hand to keep them down.”
“You don’t teach yourself?” said Dorothy.
“Oh dear, no!” said Mrs. Creevy almost contemptuously. “I’ve got a lot too much on my hands to waste my time teaching. There’s the house to look after, and seven of the children stay to dinner—I’ve only a daily woman at present. Besides, it takes me all my time getting the fees out of parents. After all, the fees are what matter, aren’t they?”
“Yes. I suppose so,” said Dorothy.
“Well, we’d better settle about your wages,” continued Mrs. Creevy. “In term time I’ll give you your board and lodging and ten shillings a week; in the holidays it’ll just be your board and lodging. You can have the use of the copper in the kitchen for your laundering, and I light the geyser for hot baths every Saturday night; or at least most Saturday nights. You can’t have the use of this room we’re in now, because it’s my reception-room, and I don’t want you to go wasting the gas in your bedroom. But you can have the use of the morning-room whatever you want it.”
“Thank you,” said Dorothy.
“Well, I should think that’ll be about all. I expect you’re feeling ready for bed. You’ll have had your supper long ago, of course?”
This was clearly intended to mean that Dorothy was not going to get any food to-night, so she answered Yes, untruthfully, and the conversation was at an end. That was always Mrs. Creevy’s way—she never kept you talking an instant longer than was necessary. Her conversation was so very definite, so exactly to the point, that it was not really conversation at all. Rather, it was the skeleton of conversation; like the dialogue in a badly written novel where everyone talks a little too much in character. But indeed, in the proper sense of the word she did not talk; she merely said, in her brief shrewish way, whatever it was necessary to say, and then got rid of you as promptly as possible. She now showed Dorothy along the passage to her bedroom, and lighted a gas-jet no bigger than an acorn, revealing a gaunt bedroom with a narrow white-quilted bed, a rickety wardrobe, one chair and a wash-hand-stand with a frigid white china basin and ewer. It was very like the bedrooms in seaside lodging houses, but it lacked the one thing that gives such rooms their air of homeliness and decency—the text over the bed.
“This is your room,” Mrs. Creevy said; “and I just hope you’ll keep it a bit tidier than what Miss Strong used to. And don’t go burning the gas half the night, please, because I can tell what time you turn it off by the crack under the door.”
With this parting salutation she left Dorothy to herself. The room was dismally cold; indeed, the whole house had a damp, chilly feeling, as though fires were rarely lighted in it. Dorothy got into bed as quickly as possible, feeling bed to be the warmest place. On top of the wardrobe, when she was putting her clothes away, she found a cardboard box containing no less than nine empty whisky bottles—relics, presumably, of Miss Strong’s weakness on the moral side.
At eight in the morning Dorothy went downstairs and found Mrs. Creevy already at breakfast in what she called the “morning-room.” This was a smallish room adjoining the kitchen, and it had started life as the scullery; but Mrs. Creevy had converted it into the “morning-room” by the simple process of removing the sink and copper into the kitchen. The breakfast table, covered with a cloth of harsh texture, was very large and forbiddingly bare. Up at Mrs. Creevy’s end were a tray with a very small teapot and two cups, a plate on which were two leathery fried eggs, and a dish of marmalade; in the middle, just within Dorothy’s reach if she stretched, was a plate of bread and butter; and beside her plate—as though it were the only thing she could be trusted with—a cruet stand with some dried-up, clotted stuff inside the bottles.
“Good morning, Miss Millborough,” said Mrs. Creevy. “It doesn’t matter this morning, as this is the first day, but just remember another time that I want you down here in time to help me get breakfast ready.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Dorothy.
“I hope you’re fond of fried eggs for your breakfast?” went on Mrs. Creevy.
Dorothy hastened to assure her that she was very fond of fried eggs.
“Well, that’s a good thing, because you’ll always have to have the same as what I have. So I hope you’re not going to be what I call dainty about your food. I always think,” she added, picking up her knife and fork, “that a fried egg tastes a lot better if you cut it well up before you eat it.”
She sliced the two eggs into thin strips, and then served them in such a way that Dorothy received about two thirds of an egg. With some difficulty Dorothy spun out her fraction of egg so as to make half a dozen mouthfuls of it, and then, when she had taken a slice of bread and butter, she could not help glancing hopefully in the direction of the dish of marmalade. But Mrs. Creevy was sitting with her lean left arm—not exactly round the marmalade, but in a protective position on its left flank, as though she suspected that Dorothy was going to make an attack upon it. Dorothy’s nerve failed her, and she had no marmalade that morning—nor, indeed, for many mornings to come.
Mrs. Creevy did not speak again during breakfast, but presently the sound of feet on the gravel outside, and of squeaky voices in the schoolroom, announced that the girls were beginning to arrive. They came in by a side door that was left open for them. Mrs. Creevy got up from the table and banged the breakfast things together on the tray. She was one of those women who can never move anything without banging it about; she was as full of thumps and raps as a poltergeist. Dorothy carried the tray into the kitchen, and when she returned Mrs. Creevy produced a penny notebook from a drawer in the dresser and laid it open on the table.
“Just take a look at this,” she said. “Here’s a list of the girls’ names that I’ve got ready for you. I shall want you to know the whole lot of them by this evening.” She wetted her thumb and turned over three pages: “Now, do you see these three lists here?”
“Yes,” said Dorothy.
“Well, you’ll just have to learn those three