and you can tell it them!”
The children were not in the least taken in. They writhed at the nauseous prospect.
“Oh, capitals! Learning capitals. That’s just what we used to do with Miss Strong. Please, Miss, why can’t we go on with the map?”
“Now don’t argue. Get your notebooks out and take them down as I give them to you. And afterwards we’ll say them all together.”
Reluctantly, the children fished out their notebooks, still groaning. “Please, Miss, can we go on with the map next time?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see.”
That afternoon the map was removed from the schoolroom, and Mrs. Creevy scraped the plasticine off the board and threw it away. It was the same with all the other subjects, one after another. All the changes that Dorothy had made were undone. They went back to the routine of interminable “copies” and interminable “practice” sums, to the learning parrot-fashion of “Passez-moi le beurre” and “Le fils du jardinier a perdu son chapeau,” to the Hundred Page History and the insufferable little “reader.” (Mrs. Creevy had impounded the Shakespeares, ostensibly to burn them. The probability was that she had sold them.) Two hours a day were set apart for handwriting lessons. The two depressing pieces of black paper, which Dorothy had taken down from the wall, were replaced, and their proverbs written upon them afresh in neat copperplate. As for the historical chart, Mrs. Creevy took it away and burnt it.
When the children saw the hated lessons, from which they had thought to have escaped for ever, coming back upon them one by one, they were first astonished, then miserable, then sulky. But it was far worse for Dorothy than for the children. After only a couple of days the rigmarole through which she was obliged to drive them so nauseated her that she began to doubt whether she could go on with it any longer. Again and again she toyed with the idea of disobeying Mrs. Creevy. Why not, she would think, as the children whined and groaned and sweated under their miserable bondage—why not stop it and go back to proper lessons, even if it was only for an hour or two a day? Why not drop the whole pretence of lessons and simply let the children play? It would be so much better for them than this. Let them draw pictures or make something out of plasticine or begin making up a fairy tale—anything real, anything that would interest them, instead of this dreadful nonsense. But she dared not. At any moment Mrs. Creevy was liable to come in, and if she found the children “messing about” instead of getting on with their routine work, there would be fearful trouble. So Dorothy hardened her heart, and obeyed Mrs. Creevy’s instructions to the letter, and things were very much as they had been before Miss Strong was “taken bad.”
The lessons reached such a pitch of boredom that the brightest spot in the week was Mr. Booth’s so-called chemistry lecture on Thursday afternoons. Mr. Booth was a seedy, tremulous man of about fifty, with long, wet, cowdung-coloured moustaches. He had been a Public School master once upon a time, but nowadays he made just enough for a life of chronic sub-drunkenness by delivering lectures at two and sixpence a time. The lectures were unrelieved drivel. Even in his palmiest days Mr. Booth had not been a particularly brilliant lecturer, and now, when he had had his first go of delirium tremens and lived in a daily dread of his second, what chemical knowledge he had ever had was fast deserting him. He would stand dithering in front of the class, saying the same thing over and over again and trying vainly to remember what he was talking about. “Remember, girls,” he would say in his husky, would-be fatherly voice, “the number of the elements is ninety-three—ninety-three elements, girls—you all of you know what an element is, don’t you?—there are just ninety-three of them—remember that number, girls—ninety-three,” until Dorothy (she had to stay in the schoolroom during the chemistry lectures, because Mrs. Creevy considered that it didn’t do to leave the girls alone with a man) was miserable with vicarious shame. All the lectures started with the ninety-three elements, and never got very much further. There was also talk of “a very interesting little experiment that I’m going to perform for you next week, girls—very interesting you’ll find it—we’ll have it next week without fail—a very interesting little experiment,” which, needless to say, was never performed. Mr. Booth possessed no chemical apparatus, and his hands were far too shaky to have used it even if he had had any. The girls sat through his lectures in a suety stupor of boredom, but even he was a welcome change from handwriting lessons.
The children were never quite the same with Dorothy after the parents’ visit. They did not change all in a day, of course. They had grown to be fond of “old Millie,” and they expected that after a day or two of tormenting them with handwriting and “commercial arithmetic” she would go back to something interesting. But the handwriting and arithmetic went on, and the popularity Dorothy had enjoyed, as a teacher whose lessons weren’t boring and who didn’t slap you, pinch you or twist your ears, gradually vanished. Moreover, the story of the row there had been over Macbeth was not long in leaking out. The children grasped that old Millie had done something wrong—they didn’t exactly know what—and had been given a “talking to.” It lowered her in their eyes. There is no dealing with children, even with children who are fond of you, unless you can keep your prestige as an adult; let that prestige be once damaged, and even the best-hearted children will despise you.
So they began to be naughty in the normal, traditional way. Before, Dorothy had only had to deal with occasional laziness, outbursts of noise and silly giggling fits; now there were spite and deceitfulness as well. The children revolted ceaselessly against the horrible routine. They forgot the short weeks when old Millie had seemed quite a good sort and school itself had seemed rather fun. Now, school was simply what it had always been, and what indeed you expected it to be—a place where you slacked and yawned and whiled the time away by pinching your neighbour and trying to make the teacher lose her temper, and from which you burst with a yell of relief the instant the last lesson was over. Sometimes they sulked and had fits of crying, sometimes they argued in the maddening persistent way that children have, “Why should we do this? Why does anyone have to learn to read and write?” over and over again, until Dorothy had to stand over them and silence them with threats of blows. She was growing almost habitually irritable nowadays; it surprised and shocked her, but she could not stop it. Every morning she vowed to herself, “To-day I will not lose my temper,” and every morning, with depressing regularity, she did lose her temper, especially at about half past eleven when the children were at their worst. Nothing in the world is quite so irritating as dealing with mutinous children. Sooner or later, Dorothy knew, she would lose control of herself and begin hitting them. It seemed to her an unforgivable thing to do, to hit a child; but nearly all teachers come to it in the end. It was impossible now to get any child to work except when your eye was upon it. You had only to turn your back for an instant and blotting-paper pellets were flying to and fro. Nevertheless, with ceaseless slave-driving the children’s handwriting and “commercial arithmetic” did certainly show some improvement, and no doubt the parents were satisfied.
The last few weeks of the term were a very bad time. For over a fortnight Dorothy was quite penniless, for Mrs. Creevy had told her that she couldn’t pay her her term’s wages “till some of the fees came in.” So she was deprived of the secret slabs of chocolate that had kept her going, and she suffered from a perpetual slight hunger that made her languid and spiritless. There were leaden mornings when the minutes dragged like hours, when she struggled with herself to keep her eyes away from the clock, and her heart sickened to think that beyond this lesson there loomed another just like it, and more of them and more, stretching on into what seemed like a dreary eternity. Worse yet were the times when the children were in their noisy mood and it needed a constant exhausting effort of the will to keep them under control at all; and beyond the wall, of course, lurked Mrs. Creevy, always listening, always ready to descend upon the schoolroom, wrench the door open and glare round the room with “Now then! What’s all this noise about, please?” and the sack in her eye.
Dorothy was fully awake, now, to the beastliness of living
