sandalwood box labelled “Piece of Bread touched by Cecil Rhodes at the City and South Africa Banquet, June 1897.” The sole books in the room were some grisly school prizes that had been won by Sir Thomas’s children—he had three, the youngest being the same age as Dorothy.
It was obvious that the servants had orders not to let her go out of doors. However, her father’s cheque for ten pounds had arrived, and with some difficulty she induced Blyth to get it cashed, and, on the third day, went out and bought herself some clothes. She bought herself a ready-made tweed coat and skirt and a jersey to go with them, a hat, and a very cheap frock of artificial printed silk; also a pair of passable brown shoes, three pairs of lisle stockings, a nasty, cheap little handbag and a pair of grey cotton gloves that would pass for suède at a little distance. That came to eight pounds ten, and she dared not spend more. As for underclothes, nightdresses and handkerchiefs, they would have to wait. After all, it is the clothes that show that matter.
Sir Thomas arrived on the following day, and never really got over the surprise that Dorothy’s appearance gave him. He had been expecting to see some rouged and powdered siren who would plague him with temptations to which, alas! he was no longer capable of succumbing; and this countrified, spinsterish girl upset all his calculations. Certain vague ideas that had been floating about in his mind, of finding her a job as a manicurist or perhaps as a private secretary to a bookie, floated out of it again. From time to time Dorothy caught him studying her with a puzzled, prawnish eye, obviously wondering how on earth such a girl could ever have figured in an elopement. It was very little use, of course, telling him that she had not eloped. She had given him her version of the story, and he had accepted it with a chivalrous “Of course, m’dear, of course!” and thereafter, in every other sentence, betrayed the fact that he disbelieved her.
So for a couple of days nothing definite was done. Dorothy continued her solitary life in the room upstairs, and Sir Thomas went to his club for most of his meals, and in the evening there were discussions of the most unutterable vagueness. Sir Thomas was genuinely anxious to find Dorothy a job, but he had great difficulty in remembering what he was talking about for more than a few minutes at a time. “Well, m’dear,” he would start off, “you’ll understand, of course, that I’m very keen to do what I can for you. Naturally, being your uncle and all that—what? What’s that? Not your uncle? No, I suppose I’m not, by Jove! Cousin—that’s it; cousin. Well, now, m’dear, being your cousin—now, what was I saying?” Then, when Dorothy had guided him back to the subject, he would throw out some such suggestion as, “Well, now, for instance, m’dear, how would you like to be companion to an old lady? Some dear old girl, don’t you know—black mittens and rheumatoid arthritis. Die and leave you ten thousand quid and care of the parrot. What, what?” which did not get them very much further. Dorothy repeated a number of times that she would rather be a housemaid or a parlourmaid, but Sir Thomas would not hear of it. The very idea awakened in him a class-instinct which he was usually too vague-minded to remember. “What!” he would say. “A dashed skivvy? Girl of your upbringing? No, m’dear—no, no! Can’t do that kind of thing, dash it!”
But in the end everything was arranged, and with surprising ease; not by Sir Thomas, who was incapable of arranging anything, but by his solicitor, whom he had suddenly thought of consulting. And the solicitor, without even seeing Dorothy, was able to suggest a job for her. She could, he said, almost certainly find a job as a schoolmistress. Of all jobs, that was the easiest to get.
Sir Thomas came home very pleased with this suggestion, which struck him as highly suitable. (Privately, he thought that Dorothy had just the kind of face that a schoolmistress ought to have.) But Dorothy was momentarily aghast when she heard of it.
“A schoolmistress!” she said. “But I couldn’t possibly! I’m sure no school would give me a job. There isn’t a single subject I can teach.”
“What? What’s that? Can’t teach. Oh, dash it! Of course you can! Where’s the difficulty?”
“But I don’t know enough! I’ve never taught anybody anything, except cooking to the Girl Guides. You have to be properly qualified to be a teacher.”
“Oh, nonsense! Teaching’s the easiest job in the world. Good thick ruler—rap ’em over the knuckles. They’ll be glad enough to get hold of a decently brought up young woman to teach the youngsters their ABC. That’s the line for you, m’dear—schoolmistress. You’re just cut out for it.”
And sure enough, a schoolmistress Dorothy became. The invisible solicitor had made all the arrangements in less than three days. It appeared that a certain Mrs. Creevy, who kept a girls’ day school in the suburb of Southbridge, was in need of an assistant, and was quite willing to give Dorothy the job. How it had all been settled so quickly, and what kind of school it could be that would take on a total stranger, and unqualified at that, in the middle of the term, Dorothy could hardly imagine. She did not know, of course, that a bribe of five pounds, miscalled a premium, had changed hands.
So, just ten days after her arrest for begging, Dorothy set out for Ringwood House Academy, Brough Road, Southbridge, with a small trunk decently full of clothes and four pounds ten in her purse—for Sir Thomas had made her a present of ten pounds. When she thought of the ease with which this job had been found for her, and then of her miserable struggles of three weeks ago, the contrast amazed her. It brought home to her, as never before, the mysterious power of money. In fact, it reminded her of a favourite saying of Mr. Warburton’s, that if you took I Corinthians, chapter thirteen, and in every verse wrote “money” instead of “charity,” the chapter had ten times as much meaning as before.
II
Southbridge was a repellent suburb ten or a dozen miles from London. Brough Road lay somewhere at the heart of it, amid labyrinths of meanly decent streets, all so indistinguishably alike, with their ranks of semi-detached houses, their privet and laurel hedges and plots of ailing shrubs at the cross-roads, that you could lose yourself there almost as easily as in a Brazilian forest. Not only the houses themselves, but even their names were the same over and over again. Reading the names on the gates as you came up Brough Road, you were conscious of being haunted by some half-remembered passage of poetry; and when you paused to identify it, you realised that it was the first two lines of Lycidas.
Ringwood House was a dark-looking, semi-detached house of yellow brick, three storeys high, and its lower windows were hidden from the road by ragged and dusty laurels. Above the laurels, on the front of the house, was a board inscribed in faded gold letters:
RINGWOOD HOUSE ACADEMY FOR GIRLS
Ages 5 to 18
MUSIC AND DANCING TAUGHT
Apply within for Prospectus.
Edge to edge with this board, on the other half of the house, was another board which read:
RUSHINGTON GRANGE HIGH SCHOOL FOR BOYS
Ages 6 to 16
Book-keeping and Commercial Arithmetic a Speciality
Apply within for Prospectus.
The district pullulated with small private schools; there were four of them in Brough Road alone. Mrs. Creevy, the principal of Ringwood House, and Mr. Boulger, the principal of Rushington Grange, were in a state of warfare, though their interests in no way clashed with one another. Nobody knew what the feud was about, not even Mrs. Creevy or Mr. Boulger themselves; it was a feud that they had inherited from earlier proprietors
