household by doing so. Next day, however, the question became more
urgent, because Mrs Semprill was now publishing the story of the
elopement far and wide. Of course, the Rector denied it violently,
but in his heart he had a sneaking suspicion that it might be true.
It was the kind of thing, he now decided, that Dorothy WOULD do. A
girl who would suddenly walk out of the house without even taking
thought for her father's breakfast was capable of anything.
Two days later the newspapers got hold of the story, and a nosy
young reporter came down to Knype Hill and began asking questions.
The Rector made matters worse by angrily refusing to interview the
reporter, so that Mrs Semprill's version was the only one that got
into print. For about a week, until the papers got tired of
Dorothy's case and dropped her in favour of a plesiosaurus that had
been seen at the mouth of the Thames, the Rector enjoyed a horrible
notoriety. He could hardly open a newspaper without seeing some
flaming headline about 'Rector's Daughter. Further Revelations',
or 'Rector's Daughter. Is she in Vienna? Reported seen in Low-
class Cabaret'. Finally there came an article in the Sunday
Spyhole, which began, 'Down in a Suffolk Rectory a broken old man
sits staring at the wall', and which was so absolutely unbearable
that the Rector consulted his solicitor about an action for libel.
However, the solicitor was against it; it might lead to a verdict,
he said, but it would certainly lead to further publicity. So the
Rector did nothing, and his anger against Dorothy, who had brought
this disgrace upon him, hardened beyond possibility of forgiveness.
After this there came three letters from Dorothy, explaining what
had happened. Of course the Rector never really believed that
Dorothy had lost her memory. It was too thin a story altogether.
He believed that she either HAD eloped with Mr Warburton, or had
gone off on some similar escapade and had landed herself penniless
in Kent; at any rate--this he had settled once and for all, and no
argument would ever move him from it--whatever had happened to her
was entirely her own fault. The first letter he wrote was not to
Dorothy herself but to his cousin Tom, the baronet. For a man of
the Rector's upbringing it was second nature, in any serious
trouble, to turn to a rich relative for help. He had not exchanged
a word with his cousin for the last fifteen years, since they had
quarrelled over a little matter of a borrowed fifty pounds; still,
he wrote fairly confidently, asking Sir Thomas to get in touch with
Dorothy if it could be done, and to find her some kind of job in
London. For of course, after what had happened, there could be no
question of letting her come back to Knype Hill.
Shortly after this there came two despairing letters from Dorothy,
telling him that she was in danger of starvation and imploring him
to send her some money. The Rector was disturbed. It occurred to
him--it was the first time in his life that he had seriously
considered such a thing--that it IS possible to starve if you have
no money. So, after thinking it over for the best part of a week,
he sold out ten pounds' worth of shares and sent a cheque for ten
pounds to his cousin, to be kept for Dorothy till she appeared. At
the same time he sent a cold letter to Dorothy herself, telling her
that she had better apply to Sir Thomas Hare. But several more
days passed before this letter was posted, because the Rector had
qualms about addressing a letter to 'Ellen Millborough'--he dimly
imagined that it was against the law to use false names--and, of
course, he had delayed far too long. Dorothy was already in the
streets when the letter reached 'Mary's'.
Sir Thomas Hare was a widower, a good-hearted, chuckle-headed man
of about sixty-five, with an obtuse rosy face and curling
moustaches. He dressed by preference in checked overcoats and
curly brimmed bowler hats that were at once dashingly smart and
four decades out of date. At a first glance he gave the impression
of having carefully disguised himself as a cavalry major of the
'nineties, so that you could hardly look at him without thinking of
devilled bones with a b and s, and the tinkle of hansom bells, and
the Pink 'Un in its great 'Pitcher' days, and Lottie Collins and
'Tarara-BOOM-deay'. But his chief characteristic was an abysmal
mental vagueness. He was one of those people who say 'Don't you
know?' and 'What! What!' and lose themselves in the middle of their
sentences. When he was puzzled or in difficulties, his moustaches
seemed to bristle forward, giving him the appearance of a well-
meaning but exceptionally brainless prawn.
So far as his own inclinations went Sir Thomas was not in the least
anxious to help his cousins, for Dorothy herself he had never seen,
and the Rector he looked on as a cadging poor relation of the worst
possible type. But the fact was that he had had just about as much
of this 'Rector's Daughter' business as he could stand. The
accursed chance that Dorothy's surname was the same as his own had
made his life a misery for the past fortnight, and he foresaw
further and worse scandals if she were left at large any longer.
So, just before leaving London for the pheasant shooting, he sent
for his butler, who was also his confidant and intellectual guide,
and held a council of war.
'Look here, Blyth, dammit,' said Sir Thomas prawnishly (Blyth was
the butler's name), 'I suppose you've seen all this damn' stuff in
the newspapers, hey? This "Rector's Daughter" stuff? About this
damned niece of mine.'
Blyth was a small sharp-featured man with a voice that never rose
above a whisper. It was as nearly silent as a voice can be while
still remaining a voice. Only by watching his lips as well as
listening closely could you catch the whole of what he said. In
this case his lips signalled something to the effect that Dorothy
was Sir Thomas's cousin, not his niece.
'What, my cousin, is she?' said Sir Thomas. 'So she is, by Jove!
Well, look here, Blyth, what I mean to say--it's about time we got
hold of the damn' girl and locked her up somewhere. See what I
mean? Get hold of her before there's any MORE trouble. She's
knocking about somewhere in London, I believe. What's the best way
of getting on her track? Police? Private detectives and all that?
D'you think we could manage it?'
Blyth's lips registered disapproval. It would, he seemed to be
saying, be possible to trace Dorothy without calling in the police
and having a lot of disagreeable publicity.
'Good man!' said Sir Thomas. 'Get to it, then. Never mind what it
costs. I'd give fifty quid not to have that "Rector's Daughter"
business over again. And for God's sake, Blyth,' he added
confidentially, 'once you've got hold of the damn' girl, don't let
her out of your sight. Bring her back to the house and damn' well
keep her here. See what I mean? Keep her under lock and key till
I get back. Or else God knows what she'll be up to next.'
Sir Thomas, of course, had never seen Dorothy, and it was therefore
excusable that he should have formed his conception of her from the
newspaper reports.
It took Blyth about a week to track Dorothy down. On the morning
after she came out of the police-court cells (they had fined her
six shillings, and, in default of payment, detained her for twelve
hours: Mrs McElligot, as an old offender, got seven days), Blyth
came up to her, lifted his bowler hat a quarter of an inch from his
head, and inquired noiselessly whether she were not Miss Dorothy
Hare. At the second attempt Dorothy understood what he was saying,
and admitted that she WAS Miss Dorothy Hare; whereupon Blyth
explained that he was sent by her cousin, who was anxious to help
her, and that she was to come home with him immediately.
Dorothy followed him without more words said. It seemed queer that
her cousin should take this sudden interest in her, but it was no
queerer than the other things that had been happening lately. They
took the bus to Hyde Park Corner, Blyth paying the fares, and then
walked to a large, expensive-looking house with shuttered windows,
on the borderland between Knightsbridge and Mayfair. They went
down some steps, and Blyth produced a key and they went in. So,
after an absence of something over six weeks, Dorothy returned to
respectable society, by the area door.
She spent three days in the empty house before her cousin came
home. It was a queer, lonely time. There were several servants in
the house, but she saw nobody except Blyth, who brought her her
meals and talked to her, noiselessly, with a mixture of deference
and disapproval. He could not quite make up his mind whether she
was a young lady of family or a rescued Magdalen, and so treated
her as something between the two. The house had that hushed,
corpselike air peculiar to houses whose master is away, so that you
instinctively went about on tiptoe and kept the blinds over the
windows. Dorothy did not even dare to enter any of the main rooms.
She spent all the daytime lurking in a dusty, forlorn room at the
top of the house which was a sort of museum of bric-a-brac dating
industrious collector of rubbish, and most of it had been stowed
away in this room when she died. It was a doubtful point whether
the queerest object in the room was a yellowed photograph of
Dorothy's father, aged eighteen but with respectable side-whiskers,
standing self-consciously beside an 'ordinary' bicycle--this was in
1888; or whether it was a little 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 suede 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 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
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 the 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 1 Corinthians, chapter
thirteen, and in every verse wrote 'money' instead of 'charity',
the chapter had ten times as much meaning as before.
2
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 crossroads, 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 realized 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 of the two schools. In the
mornings after breakfast they would stalk up and down their
respective back gardens, beside the very low wall that separated
them, pretending not to see one another and grinning with hatred.