CHAPTER III

Even a very dull person may achieve his aim if he has only one aim, and devotes his entire attention to it.

Elsie’s aim in life was to please Miss Strickland. She thought of nothing else by day, and she dreamed of nothing else by night.

All the other teachers, and the objects of their efforts, slipped past her. She saw them vaguely as trees walking, and bumped into them from time to time with some severity. She was considered the dunce of the school.

The cream of her concentration was her work for the piano. She practised as the devotee prays. She did not think any more of the actual process than the devotee thinks of his prayers. It is the Deity which is the object of the devotee, and it was Miss Strickland who stood for Elsie beyond the five-finger exercises and chromatic scales; even as the vision of Beatrice leaned towards Dante out of Paradise.

Miss Strickland was amazed at the child’s progress; she was the more amazed because she had seen from the first with an instinct practically unerring, that she was not dealing with talent. She still believed that it was not talent. It was something that baffled Miss Strickland—an ardour of obedience, a stake-like adherence to her least words, which produced odd blunders, and sudden advances, and finally a higher level of achievement than that of any pupil in the school.

For two years the intercourse between Miss Strickland and Elsie was limited to forty minutes a week in the music room.

Elsie accepted Miss Strickland’s temper as the earth accepts the ministrations of climate. Sun and shower, heat and cold were part, no doubt, of a divine plan, and so were the sharpness and the comparative mildness of Miss Strickland’s nerves.

Of course Elsie liked them to be mild, but when they were sharp they seemed to her like the magnetic lightnings of the Universe.

Miss Strickland had never had a pupil whom she could hurt more. She was often unscrupulous in the use of her power, but the absoluteness of it in Elsie’s case stayed her hand.

Elsie had no defence against her, and she would have used none if she had had it.

One day Miss Strickland announced,

“There is to be a concert at the end of the term, Elsie. You have improved so much lately that I have told Miss Bretherton that you will play at it.”

Elsie squirmed. “Oh, if you please, Miss Strickland, I can’t!” she stammered. “I couldn’t—not before people—I’m too—I’m too afraid!”

“Nonsense,” said Miss Strickland firmly. “I am the best judge of whether you can play or not, and I have decided that you can. It is absurd to be afraid of people who know very little about music and have come prepared to be easily pleased. You are not afraid to play before me, and I don’t come prepared to be pleased, and do know a good deal about music.”

Elsie, if she could have explained, would have said, “That’s what I’m afraid of—not pleasing you. It’s you that will care about the people.”

But it was out of the question to make a statement of this kind to Miss Strickland, even if it had occurred to Elsie that it was the truth, and things seldom occurred to Elsie as the truth until after what she had been afraid of had happened.

She merely repeated in an agony, “Oh, please don’t make me play! I shall break down! I know I shall break down! It would terrify me to disappoint you!”

To which Miss Strickland replied, “Don’t be idiotic. I have decided upon Mendelssohn.”

The school at Little Ticklington gave particularly good concerts.

Besides the parents, the Mayor sometimes appeared with several Town Councillors, the Vicar, who was an Archdeacon, and various people in the neighbourhood who thought Education ought to be encouraged and that their presence at School Concerts encouraged it.

Miss Strickland sat at the back of the hall, so that she could hear if the songs carried.

She had prepared all the girls carefully, and Miss Saunders, who lived in the School, would supervise them on the platform.

Miss Strickland had not seen Elsie for three days. At her last lesson she had played the Mendelssohn uncommonly well, but she had annoyed Miss Strickland by opening and shutting her mouth like a fish. Miss Strickland had told her so, and Elsie had then shut her mouth and kept it shut, but Miss Strickland had still been annoyed. She was conscious of something in the child that was not consenting to her will, and this was very unusual.

Children must play at Concerts. Elsie was now fourteen, she was a great big girl, and the Mendelssohn was very easy.

Miss Strickland told herself these reassuring facts several times before the curtain swung vacillatingly back for the first girl to perform. “Besides,” Miss Strickland hastily informed herself, “I take no special interest in Elsie.”

The first girl performed as first girls generally do. She was chosen for her hardihood and she had a little over-estimated it. Still she banged pleasantly away, and while she was too nervous to remember any of the finer shades of Miss Strickland’s careful teaching, she played no wrong notes, and covered up the weakness of her execution with that merciful solvent of pianoforte puzzles, the loud pedal.

Miss Strickland mentally provided for this young criminal a castigation of the direst kind, short of direct profanity. Only men (who deserve it) may have the relief of an entire language to devote to wrath. Miss Strickland had to rely upon the fervency of her emotion. Then she listened, with the grim patience of a teacher who is not involved in the subject, to a bad recitation.

After this there were several excellent and charming songs with choruses. Miss Strickland had taught them to the school, and in one case written the song herself.

They went with a vim, and gave her a certain amount of very slight pleasure. And then Elsie appeared.

She was dressed in a heavy white muslin dress which revealed her thick ankles and pitilessly broad-toed shoes.

It was the wrong kind of muslin, trimmed with tawdry embroidery and girt about the untamed breadth of her waist by a harsh blue sash. Her hair lay lankly down her back, evading where it could the ministrations of a similarly harsh blue ribbon.

Elsie moved heavily and stared at the audience with the eyes of a sleep walker.

Miss Strickland had particularly told Elsie to keep her mouth shut, her head up and her chin in. The results of these attempts upon the figure are usually beneficial to young performers, but nothing could do much for Elsie’s figure; it remained thick and uncertain, with a tendency to bulge in the wrong places.

Miss Strickland felt an unusual pang of depression when she saw Elsie, followed by a much more usual one of rage.

Why had not Elsie’s mother chosen more suitable clothes for her? “Women again! They only think of clothes, and they show the value of their thought by a stupid result like this!” thought Miss Strickland sternly.

Elsie sat down clumsily on the music stool. It was lower than she had expected it to be. Miss Saunders, the young music teacher, adjusted the Mendelssohn.

It was “The Venetian Boat Song,” the easiest and lightest of concert pieces.

Elsie played the first two bars quite faultlessly. Miss Strickland was about to breathe a sigh of relief, when, to her horror, the girl stopped abruptly and took her hands off the piano. Then she played the first two bars over again, and stopped once more.

There was a long silence in the hall, a breathless, inconvenient silence, and then Elsie turned slowly on her music stool away from the piano and faced the audience. She looked like some one delivering themselves into the hands of Red Indians for torture. She faced them with her hands in her lap and her eyes fixed, not so much appealingly as hopelessly, upon the audience.

She did not cry; it was the expression of an immovable despair. She neither stirred nor spoke, she only looked straight in front of her as if she saw the end of Hope.

Miss Strickland felt as if the child’s gaze fixed itself upon her heart. Before she had time to move, Miss Saunders had stepped forward at a sign from Miss Bretherton, and led Elsie away.

It was obviously impossible for any one who looked like that to play “The Venetian Boat Song.”

Miss Saunders (who wanted Elsie to enjoy the tea afterwards) led her to the back row of little girls.

Elsie went with her passively and sank into her seat like a thing frozen.

Miss Strickland had once watched a baby rabbit holding itself together to look like a leaf—its fear had fixed it into the landscape.

Elsie looked like that. She did not move for half an hour; she was as anxious as the baby rabbit to escape all observation.

A group of charmingly dressed girls came on to the stage and danced. There were no more hitches. Everything else was beautifully done; and when it was over Elsie asked if she might go and rest. She said she had a headache.

Miss Saunders, who was sympathetic and didn’t know what else to say—agreed readily. The other girls stared at Elsie, but no one was cruel enough, or kind enough, to say anything to her. They all felt that she was interesting to talk about, but uncomfortable to talk to, and they left her alone.

Miss Strickland decided to do the same. She took her tea on the lawn and ate some particularly good strawberries without enjoying them.

Then she went to look for Elsie. There were very few places where Elsie had any right to be. She wasn’t in the empty school room, or in the small ante-room used by the teachers before they went into their classes. She was in the dressing room behind a curtain, lying on the boots and shoes.

It was only by the faintest of creaks that her presence was disclosed to Miss Strickland. She lay there in a crumpled heap of muslin and anguish, sobbing as if her heart would break.

It was very pitiful to see her. Miss Strickland knelt down by Elsie’s side and tried to speak, but to her surprise she found it difficult. She said “My dear child,” twice over, the first time her voice actually shook. Then she recovered herself.

“Stop grovelling among those boots!” she exclaimed sharply. This was better. Elsie sat up, and made an enormous effort to control herself, but the sobs had got possession of her: they shook her down among the boots again.

Miss Strickland frowned. “It’s all my fault,” she found herself saying. “I ought not to have made you play, and you really mustn’t be so distressed about it. People often make mistakes. One can retrieve them. I daresay,” said Miss Strickland mercifully, but without accuracy, “I daresay I’ve broken down myself before now, but I shouldn’t give way about it. I know that it was not carelessness on your part. On the contrary, you were trying too hard!”

“Oh!” gasped Elsie, “don’t you hate me? You must—I know you must! You see I can’t—I’m no good. I never was any good! And I never will be! I’m like that!”

Miss Strickland was shocked. She disliked over-confidence (over-confident people always do) but this child’s formidable hopelessness was worse than any over-confidence. She was behaving as if there were a flaw in the Universe; and in Miss Strickland’s Universe there had never been a flaw. She had disliked many occurrences but she had felt equal to them, whether she disliked them or not. She did not feel equal to what was happening now. She said, “My dear, you mustn’t be silly. If you weren’t some good you wouldn’t be here!”

Elsie replied, “But I know I’m not, and I don’t want to be here, I’d rather be dead.”

“That’s sillier still,” Miss Strickland answered doubtfully, “and it’s also very wrong.”

“What does it matter if it’s wrong or not—if you hate me—” sobbed Elsie. “Nothing matters to me except that!”

Miss Strickland stared at her uncomfortably. She still did not know what action was the most sensible to take.

An instinct told her what to do, but she was not used to instincts, and felt flurried by having one. Her instinct told her to take the child in her arms.

She compromised with it, and kissed Elsie, a little reluctantly, on the cheek.

“I don’t hate you at all, child,” she said kindly. “You’re a very good, painstaking little girl, and I am very fond of you.”

Then Miss Strickland arrived at the nearest she was ever likely to get to a miracle.

She saw a plain little girl, made plainer by a convulsive fit of crying, turn perfectly beautiful. It was like watching a black and windswept country yielding to the sun. Across Elsie’s face light spread: the light of an infinite gratitude, a preposterous faith, an overwhelming love.

Her eyes met Miss Strickland’s and held hers almost against her will.

“Then,” the child said slowly, “I’m glad I broke down.”

It was the truth, and Miss Strickland with her love of truth should have recognised it; but she had already recognised a great deal more than it was at all comfortable to recognise. She really couldn’t go on recognising things which were so far from sensible, whether they were true or not.

“Well, don’t let us have any more nonsense,” she said briskly. “Wipe your eyes, and brush, as far as you can, the dust off your frock. You really should not have lain down on boots and shoes, it was most unsuitable. You’d better come and see Miss Bretherton; she has been asking about you on the lawn, and she’s no more angry with you than I am.”

“Please may I go home?” Elsie pleaded. “I’m quite happy now, only I don’t want to see any one else. You see nobody else matters.”

Miss Strickland hesitated. Head mistresses always matter. Still she had pressed the point about Elsie’s playing and it had proved a mistake. Onoria made a point of learning from her mistakes, when she saw them. Perhaps it was better to waive the point. The child looked dreadful, she could make excuses for her to Miss Bretherton, and excuses are tidier and more malleable than tear-stained little girls.

“Very well,” Miss Strickland said at last, “you may go home if you want to—” But there was something in Elsie’s eyes which still held hers.

“If I might,” whispered Elsie bravely, “play you ‘The Venetian Boat Song’—before I go?”

Miss Strickland nodded. She led the way into a small practice room, out of reach of the festivities on the lawn. Then she sat down on a hard cane chair and listened to “The Venetian Boat Song” for perhaps the 500th time.

It did not sound at all familiar to her.

Elsie played it as Miss Strickland had never heard it played before. For the only time in her life music was captured by Elsie’s faithful, clumsy, little fingers. She played it dreamily, tenderly, with ardour and with grace, as Mendelssohn himself might have played it—who had the heart of a child.

There was a little silence after the last notes sounded.

“That,” Elsie explained as she turned round slowly on her music stool, “was the way I had meant to play it.”