CHAPTER VII

Miss Strickland had great self-control, and she needed it. When her amazed eyes rested upon Elsie and Peter Gubbins, she could hardly believe them. Disobedience and deceit united for purposes of pleasure had never so flaunted themselves before her in the whole course of her career. For a week she had believed Elsie and Peter to be crushed. Crushed as flat as a black beetle under the heel of a self-respecting cook.

For a moment she was almost too astonished to be angry. How had they dared? They who in general dared so little—to rush upon the knife?

But her surprise was swiftly reinforced by anger. She was in a consecrated building and the oratorio had begun—so she remained perfectly still although her figure became charged like an electric battery. All the six pupils of Miss Bretherton received small invigorating shocks from it.

They knew something was wrong—and not with them. After all the Messiah was not going to be such a bore as they had feared.

They followed the direction of Miss Strickland’s eyes and arrived at Elsie and Peter.

The opening chorus might have been a Salute to Adventurers. Solemnly and gloatingly the pupils gazed at the desperate couple. Peter and Elsie felt all these hostile eyes converging upon them, and they saw nothing else.

The tenderness of the massed violins in the Pastoral Symphony (they were not quite tender enough, but it is difficult for amateur violins to be tender, and it is even more difficult for them to be sufficiently massed) did nothing whatever to soften the atmosphere. It would have been as useful to try the effect of Handel’s music upon terriers in a rat hunt.

The hunt went on from end to end of the Messiah. It was conducted in silence by seven pairs of eyes, led by Miss Strickland.

The girls ought to have been upon the side of the rats. They had no quarrel with Elsie Andrews, who had left School before their time, they knew Mr. Gubbins by sight and were without personal claims upon him even in the realms of fancy. All of them disliked Miss Strickland, and yet none of them refrained from the pursuit of the stricken quarry.

They could barely wait for the unearthly shrieks of the Hallelujah Chorus, the separate clauses of which went off like corks from a bottle, before they knelt for a respectful and non-committal moment in the direction of the Altar, and proceeded to bear down upon the delinquents through the main aisle of the Cathedral.

They thrilled with ecstasy at the resonant and piercing voice of Miss Strickland when she said aloud in the sacred building “Elsie!” In another moment they would have been upon the culprits had not a remorseless family of nine interfered between them and their prey.

Breathless, they hacked their way to the door, only to see Elsie and Peter arm-in-arm disappearing round a corner.

Then Miss Strickland reined them in.

She said with perfect self-control and extreme unfairness, “I don’t know what you girls are hurrying for. There is plenty of time to catch the train. Please walk at your usual pace and in your usual order.”

Miss Strickland never spoke twice. She had only once said “Elsie.” When this command failed, her lips and her heart had simultaneously closed.

She had made a mistake in tactics. She saw in a flash, too late to rectify her action, that she should have called “Peter!” not “Elsie!” Peter had had the strength to deny her claim upon Elsie, but he would never have had strength to deny a direct command made to himself, in a Cathedral. Onoria knew theoretically that it is always wisest to tackle the strongest of two culprits first. It was indeed her invariable and most successful practise, but her heart had betrayed her, she had struck out at her Beloved—and her Beloved had in consequence got clean away.

Onoria pulled herself together when she reached the street, and made no more mistakes.

Her duty was to her pupils, and she did it.

Methodically, though with a heart on fire, she arranged their return tickets and marshalled them into the train. If Elsie and Peter had been on the Station, Onoria would have seen them but she would not have noticed them.

She put her charges into a third class carriage marked “Ladies Only,” took a corner seat by the window, and proceeded to bone “the Messiah” for the delectation of her pupils.

Her trained ear had after all enabled her to listen to it sufficiently for her to be capable of stating its faults.

Onoria had no great passion for Handel at the best of times and the average grasp of a Local Orchestral Society is not the best of times for Handel, but on this occasion she was vitriolic.

The girls heard her with awe.

Somebody was catching it, even if they were great and dead. They would have preferred to see Elsie and Peter catching it because they were alive and lived at Little Ticklington, but they could not have everything.

Destruction always appeals to the young, and on the whole they had a far better time than they had had any right to expect at an oratorio in a Cathedral.

Miss Strickland saw them safely back to their respective homes. Two of the girls were boarders and these she dropped at the School gates.

Then she turned hastily homewards.

Samson was at her door. He was a gloomy and outraged cat, wet by the autumn mist and deprived of his invariable tea, with Mr. Gubbins’ share of cream, and a fire-warmed knee to rest up against afterwards.

He did not so much miss Mr. Gubbins as actively resent him. He miaued coarsely. Miss Strickland subdued a temptation to hit him sharply on the head with her umbrella.

It was quite open to her to hit him and it would serve Peter right. But Miss Strickland was a just woman; she reminded herself that the soul that sinneth it shall die.

Samson was not an accessory either before or after the fact, and it was a fact which had postponed his tea, and to which he would therefore have definitely refused his consent if consulted.

She opened the door and Samson flew past her and consumed loudly and without hesitation Prendergast’s neglected dinner.

Prendergast had not wanted his dinner, and he did not want it now, but still less did he wish to see a low cat indulging itself with his sacred rites. There had always been a state of armed neutrality between the two animals: neither was strong enough to wholly destroy the other, so they wisely avoided combat, but they were not friends.

Prendergast growled feebly from his basket, and gazed at his mistress expecting her instant and effectual intervention, but Miss Strickland sank down on a chair beside him with all her things on and her hands in her lap.

Bridget had let the fire go out and Prendergast shivered sharply to remind Onoria to relight it. What had she come home for if not to relight the fire and restore comfort? But still she did not raise her eyes—she murmured “There, there,” and “Poor old Prendie—” but her mind was not on him. She was sitting in a curiously bowed position, as if something within her was refusing to fight.

Samson finished the last mouthful of Prendergast’s meal, wiped his whiskers ostentatiously in front of the basket and disappeared lightly through a back window. He was quite willing to eat a meal in Miss Strickland’s house but he had no intention of giving her the benefit of his company in return.

A person who kept a moribund pug in a basket was hardly the kind of society a cat of Samson’s standing in the neighbourhood would care to choose as a friend.

Miss Strickland did not notice the defection of Samson; she did not for a long while notice anything. There was an inward drama in her heart which held her whole attention.

Something implored her to let her pride go, and keep her friends. It told her that she was getting old and had few earthly ties, that Elsie was dearer to her than she knew, and even Peter was a treasured habit left over from the richer years, and that if she used her anger too ruthlessly against them she would be condemning herself to perpetual loneliness.

One cannot make new ties at fifty-three, too much of life has gone, too many hopes have passed into too many memories.

One cannot explain oneself to new friends, and they cannot know how the early generosities and charms of our characters have staled and wearied with the weight of time.

They do not excuse our scars or realise our finished struggles. How can they dream that our egoism was once a winged idealism set to reach the stars? That our irritability was a vivacity of intellect condemned to a provincial vocabulary, that even our dogmatism is but an old loyalty stiffened into bad temper?

It is in middle age that we most need the mercy of a contemporary, and the memory of a friend.

Onoria really wanted Elsie to be happy. She didn’t want her to grow up into a dull, lonely old woman with a pet animal. But it was hard to give her up to Peter.

If Peter had only been a _man_! It wasn’t, Onoria assured herself, that she minded about her old relation to Peter. After all she never had valued it; still he was the only man it would have been any use Onoria’s minding.

She despised Peter, and the worst of it was that Elsie, whom she loved, cared more for this Peter whom Onoria despised than she did for Onoria’s opinion of him. That was the sting of stings.

Onoria had laid out Peter on the dissecting table of her wit over and over again before Elsie, and Elsie had connived at these spiritual post-mortems without a qualm, and all the while she planned this hideous treachery!

Miss Strickland looked facts in the face: if she gave in, Elsie and Peter would come back to her. They would come gladly into her sphere again. There would be no bitterness and no reproaches. They would just—all three of them—settle down.

But there would be one difference, one fatal difference to Onoria’s pride. They would both of them know that they had got the better of her.

They would give her love and even respect, but it would never be “glad, confident morning” again.

If they wanted something else which Onoria disapproved of their having, they would combine to get it.

They might marry or not—Onoria was above the petty sting of wincing at the legal ceremony—but they would combine—that was what she winced at.

She must choose once and for all. There are moments in life when choice is within our own hands—though they are very rare—when we can decide with the finality of an earthquake or a volcano what we intend to do with our future. Pride pushed Onoria into resistance and love drew her towards surrender.

Love urged that she would be glad to see Elsie happy, that she could not want to hurt Elsie, that nothing but not hurting Elsie really mattered. Love is always immoral. It slays pride, it urges that law is only a letter and possession a bitter illusion of the senses, and that only Freedom—the freedom to serve the beloved—counts in the eternal scheme of things.

Love ignored Peter Gubbins and how necessary it was to give him a lesson; it made specious excuses for Elsie’s flagrant treachery; it said “She only deceived you because she didn’t want to hurt you—she only disobeyed you to be happy, and after all that is what you want, isn’t it? You want Elsie to be happy?”

Miss Strickland wavered under the pressure of love; but she only wavered. Righteousness and self-respect rose up afresh in her. Self-respect at the touch of which Love always dwindles out of sight and Righteousness which so often consists in carrying out our own will, in an imagined connection with the Deity.

“I shall do right, whatever it costs me,” Onoria said to herself at last, and she did not know that she might as well have said, “I shall do what I like, whatever it costs anybody else.”

It would have meant precisely the same thing.