CHAPTER II

Elsie Andrews was exactly the kind of girl Miss Strickland disliked most. Nobody really liked Elsie very much because it is difficult to like a child who constantly squirms. She went, at school, by the name of “The Worm.” The young have an unconscious preference for success or the materials of success, and no one could have imagined a success being made of Elsie.

She had long, greasy, dark hair which fell perfectly straight down her back, and was the colour of a wet haystack. Her eyes were small and rather weak, her chin receded, and her complexion was a pale fawn colour.

She came into a room as if she were holding herself together with difficulty, and was unpleasantly conscious of having broken the Ten Commandments. If she had really broken them there would have been some sense in it; but she never broke anything except the points of her pencils.

Miss Strickland did not notice her, except to tell her to sit up, or to get out of the way.

It came as a shock to the whole school when it learned that Elsie had petitioned to be allowed to take music lessons from Miss Strickland, instead of from the less accomplished but much milder teacher provided for the younger girls.

It was like asking to be led into a lion’s den without having evinced the slightest aptitude for being a Daniel.

It was supposed that Miss Strickland would make short work of her, and that after the first or second music lesson Elsie’s whitened bones would be left outside the music room door.

Miss Strickland herself, staring at the small bowed figure on the music stool, felt as a rose fancier might feel if asked to entertain the most noxious of the caterpillars.

Here was a true type of feminine nature—a prevaricating, vacillating, cowardly little girl; and Elsie was vain too, or how would she have dared to claim the best teacher in the school for presumably the worst pupil?

She so exemplified everything that Miss Strickland felt women in general were, without any of the attractions which, in the eyes of the undiscriminating, outweigh these disadvantages, that Miss Strickland felt a certain kindliness rise in her—the kindliness of a prophet who sees his worst prognostications blossom into disastrous facts.

“May I ask what you think you know about music?” she shot out at the child with a twist of her determined chin.

This was Miss Strickland’s usual preliminary to a campaign of slaughter, and all new pupils, even if she had a kindly feeling towards them, had to be slaughtered first.

Elsie choked, looked helplessly at her limp little fingers, and stammered, “Nothing, please!”

Miss Strickland did not appear in the least mollified by this collapse of confidence.

“Under the circumstances,” she replied with the easy smartness of a licensed bully, “can you tell me why the teacher for the younger girls was not considered sufficiently good for you?”

There was a breathless silence before Elsie, with an astonishing spasm of courage, answered,

“I shouldn’t have learned anything from her, please.”

“‘Couldn’t’ is no doubt what you mean,” said Miss Strickland with genial irony. “And ‘couldn’t’ will be no doubt the result of trying to learn from me. Not even the cleverest teacher can mate a good job with a bad tool. You are a very inefficient little girl. You don’t know how to sit on a music stool, or how to hold your hands. Your back is a disgrace, and your fingers are all thumbs. Let’s hear you play something. What have you got here—rubbish? Oh, I see—worse than rubbish—the usual Sonata by that poor Mozart—mercifully he is dead!

“Play it, and as I am not dead, pray do not make it any louder than is strictly necessary. Keep your feet off the pedals. Pupils who don’t know how to play their notes have an idea that they can fall back on the loud pedal to drown their incompetence. That is not the proper use of pedals. They were never put into a piano to reinforce blunders.”

Elsie dropped the Sonata on the floor, and in picking it up overturned the music stool.

Miss Strickland longed to slap her. Like all highly strung musical organisations, she loathed a sudden noise.

“Clumsy little animal!” she said under her breath.

Elsie heard her and turned a dull crimson. She arranged the Sonata with trembling fingers and started off solemnly upon its well-known track.

Every note she played was a mistake. She altered pace, she ignored rhythm. She tried for expression when the notes escaped her. She wallowed desperately on through the thickening disapproval of Miss Strickland’s portentous silence.

Miss Strickland considered that she was giving Elsie a chance.

Elsie knew exactly what the Sonata sounded like to Miss Strickland—she had the vision of the disciple into the mind of the master.

She knew she was inflicting torture upon her ideal human being—but still she inflicted it, having grasped that obedience is better than sacrifice, even the sacrifice of the feelings of the one you are bound to obey.

Blandina before the maddened cow in the Coliseum could not have shown a more desperate courage.

At the end Miss Strickland said with deceptive calm, “You cannot like music, it is impossible! What on earth persuaded you to suggest that I should teach you?”

For a long while Elsie said nothing; she seemed engrossed in folding up the Sonata. Then she lifted her rather weak eyes to Miss Strickland’s face; she had no colour at all, her very lips were white—“Because I liked you—” she stammered. “I wanted you to speak to me—even if you were angry——”

Miss Strickland was not an expert in Biblical language—but there was a quotation which attacked her mind at that moment, and which stuck in her memory for years afterwards: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”

She was the first to look away.

If there was one thing Miss Strickland had always set her face against, it was school-girl devotions. If she had any reason for supposing that any particular girl was guilty of such a sentiment towards herself, she crushed it ruthlessly within the hour of its conception.

But there was something in Elsie’s eyes which was different from anything she had seen in the eyes of other girls.

It would not be an easy act for a strong swimmer to deprive a drowning man of his straw. As far as life was concerned Miss Strickland was a strong swimmer, and Elsie was a drowning man, her hopeless, helpless eyes said it.

She had this one desire, this one strange, pitiful claim upon the Universe, and having made it, she was prepared to drown. She said no more.

She did not cry, she sat and trembled on her music stool, looking dumbly at Miss Strickland’s face.

Miss Strickland hesitated. She had always worked on principle before—girls below a certain standard were Miss Saunders’ pupils, girls above it were hers. It is not easy to break a principle at one’s own expense.

Then she said with conscious dryness, “Well—we must see what we can do with you.” She had not taken away the straw. The small figure beside her gave a long sigh of relief.

“You quite understand,” continued Miss Strickland with her usual firmness, “that I make no promises. If you work very hard and improve, I will try to keep you, but it will require all the work you have in you. Now I am going to tell you, not _all_ the things that were wrong in your playing—that would be impossible in the short time that is left to us—but I shall point out a few of them which I shall expect you to overcome before the next lesson.

“As you play the Sonata all wrong, I should suggest your never touching it again and starting to learn properly something you have never seen before. Are you listening to me attentively?”

Elsie nodded, she tried to listen attentively, but she was hearing instead of Miss Strickland’s words the music of the spheres. The sons of God were shouting together in a newly created world.

Her heart’s desire had been granted to Elsie. She was not going to be abandoned by the one being on earth whom she truly loved.

It is unfortunate to have to confess at this point that both Elsie’s parents were living.

Her father was a genial tradesman of the higher class of tradesmen; he did not serve in his own shop, and liked to romp with his children when he came home from business.

Mrs. Andrews was a flighty, pretentious little woman, who had overlaid the maternal instinct by a desire to get on in the world. She would have liked a pretty little girl to show off to her neighbours, but she preferred boys.

She had two of them, and she had brought them up to tease and tyrannise over their small sister. They did this without imagination or cruelty of intention, until they were old enough for school, when they ignored her.

There were little things she could do for them in the holidays, and if she did them all right she could live in peace.

It was a great relief to Elsie Andrews when nobody at home paid any attention to her, but it could not quite fill the whole horizon of youth. Miss Strickland filled the rest of it. Elsie believed in her as the wisest, most beautiful, and grandest of earthly beings. She sometimes wondered if Queen Victoria had ever been like her. Not in some ways; for Elsie hugged it to her heart as a golden but guilty secret that her goddess was “advanced.” Elsie would not have revealed it under torture, but she had seen Miss Strickland smoke a cigarette behind the shrubbery in the school garden. Probably Queen Victoria had never done this; she had lacked that final Napoleonic touch of audacity.

Miss Strickland’s cigarette was the nearest thing to an adventure that Elsie had ever known.

It took the place in her imagination of “perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.” She never passed a tobacco shop without a thrill of memory, and she saw, far down the vista of the years, a kindred moment for herself. It was with the aspect of Miss Strickland’s light blue eyes and trim, erect figure (the rest of her appearance was not very impressive) that Elsie supposed Venus had arisen from the sea. (The blue serge coat and skirt which invariably accompanied Miss Strickland, no doubt adhered to her later.)

Miss Strickland was as beautiful as Venus, as grand as Queen Victoria, as wise as Minerva. As far as Elsie was concerned, wisdom would die with Miss Strickland. When Onoria said “That’s settled,” Elsie would rather have disputed the last trump.

It had taken two years of dumb and invisible worship before Elsie had dared to make this final bid for the notice of her goddess.

She knew it was final: if Miss Strickland had turned her away, she would have sunk like a stone to the bottom of her despair. She would never have attempted to move again. Life would have gone on all round her, but she would not have lived. She was living now; every breathless moment of her terrible lesson she had lived—ardour and agony combined in her. She felt that she was moving as swiftly as the Scotch express—sparks were flying out from the tension of her silence.

“Well,” said Miss Strickland, “you’ve had over your hour—and I think I’ve told you enough to go on with. You haven’t talent, but don’t let that discourage you, I never believe in little girls with talent; work produces ability up to a certain point. There is no such thing as a woman genius and never will be.”

Elsie looked at her in surprise.

“But you—” she murmured. “Surely you are a genius?”

“Nonsense,” said Miss Strickland, flushing half with annoyance and half with a feeling that was not annoyance.

“I am nothing of the kind. I am merely a very hard-working person with the natural advantages of a good ear and light fingers.”

Elsie could not believe this and she looked as if she could not believe it; but she said nothing.

“Now run along,” said Miss Strickland briskly but not unkindly. You cannot be unkind to a person who will not believe that you are not a genius.

Elsie went out of the music room with her head held up and her eyes sparkling.

Miss Strickland did not immediately ring the bell to summon her next pupil. She felt unaccountably stirred.

“A very ordinary little girl,” she said to herself reassuringly. “A _most_ ordinary little girl. Still I will see if something can’t be done with her. The poor child has been shamefully neglected by some woman no doubt. Women are the most destructive force in existence, or I should rather say weakness. Force is creative and appertains to man. Women are destructive because they have no force; they destroy by the conscious exercise of their weakness.”

Then Miss Strickland rang the bell. She felt more natural after this little fling at her old enemy, and she had succeeded in hiding from herself why she had given way to Elsie, who should most certainly have been returned to Miss Saunders.