Her mind ran about in this unbridled, Cockney schoolgirl’s vein. There was no stopping it. It was in honour of the day! She was temporarily inhibited from bashing policemen on the head, so she was mentally disrespectful to constituted authority—to Sir Vincent Macmaster, Principal Secretary to H.M. Department of Statistics, author of Walter Savage Lander, a Critical Monograph, and of twenty-two other Critical Monographs in the Eminent Bores’ Series. … Such books! And she was being disrespectful and patronising to Lady Macmaster, Egeria to innumerable Scottish Men of Letters! No more respect! Was that to be a lasting effect of the cataclysm that had involved the world? The late cataclysm! Thank God, since ten minutes ago they could call it the late cataclysm!
She was positively tittering in front of the telephone from which Lady Macmaster’s voice was now coming in earnest, cajoling tones—as if she knew that Valentine was not paying very much attention, saying:
“Valentine! Valentine! Valentine!”
Valentine said negligently:
“I’m listening!”
She wasn’t really. She was really reflecting on whether there had not been more sense on the Mistress’s Conference that that morning, solemnly, had taken place in the Head’s private room. Undoubtedly what the Mistresses with the Head at their head had feared was that if they, Headmistresses, Mistresses, Masters, Pastors—by whom I was made etcetera!—should cease to be respected because saturnalia broke out on the sounding of a maroon the whole world would go to pieces! An awful thought! The Girls no longer sitting silent in the nonconformist hall while the Head addressed repressive speeches to them. …
She had addressed a speech, containing the phrase: “the Credit of a Great Public School,” in that Hall only last afternoon in which, fair thin woman, square elbowed, with a little of sunlight really still in her coiled fair hair, she had seriously requested the Girls not again to repeat the manifestations of joy of the day before. The day before there had been a false alarm and the School—Horribly!—had sung:
“Hang Kaiser Bill from the hoar apple tree
And Glory Glory Glory till it’s teatime!”
The Head, now, making her speech was certain that she had now before her a chastened School, a School that anyhow felt foolish because the rumour of the day before had turned out to be a canard. So she impressed on the Girls the nature of the joy they ought to feel: a joy repressed that should send them silent home. Blood was to cease to be shed: a fitting cause for home-joy—as it were a home-lesson. But there was to be no triumph. The very fact that you ceased hostilities precluded triumph. …
Valentine, to her surprise, had found herself wondering when you might feel triumph? … You couldn’t whilst you were still contending: you must not when you had won! Then when? The Head told the girls that it was their province as the future mothers of England—Nay, of reunited Europe!—to—well, in fact, to go on with their home-lessons and not run about the streets with effigies of the Great Defeated! She put it that it was their function to shed further light of womanly culture—that there, Thank Heaven, they had never been allowed to forget!—athwart a re-illumined Continent. … As if you could light up now there was no fear of submarines or raids!
And Valentine wondered why, for a mutinous moment, she had wanted to feel triumph … had wanted someone to feel triumph. Well, he … they … had wanted it so much. Couldn’t they have it just for a moment—for the space of one Benkollerdy! Even if it were wrong? or vulgar? Something human, someone had once said, is dearer than a wilderness of decalogues!
But at the Mistress’s Conference that morning, Valentine had realised that what was really frightening them was the other note. A quite definite fear. If, at this parting of the ways, at this crack across the table of History, the School—the World, the future mothers of Europe—got out of hand, would they ever come back? The Authorities—Authority all over the world—was afraid of that; more afraid of that than of any other thing. Wasn’t it a possibility that there was to be no more Respect? None for constituted Authority and consecrated Experience?
And, listening to the fears of those careworn, faded, ill-nourished gentlewomen, Valentine Wannop had found herself speculating.
“No more respect. … For the Equator! For the Metric system. For Sir Walter Scott! Or George Washington! Or Abraham Lincoln! Or the Seventh Commandment!!!!!!”
And she had a blushing vision of fair, shy, square-elbowed Miss Wanostrocht—the Head!—succumbing to some specious-tongued beguiler! … That was where the shoe really pinched! You had to keep them—the Girls, the Populace, everybody!—in hand now, for once you let go there was no knowing where They, like waters parted from the seas, mightn’t carry You. Goodness knew! You might arrive anywhere—at county families taking to trade; gentlefolk selling for profit! All the unthinkable sorts of things!
And with a little inward smirk of pleasure Valentine realised that that Conference was deciding that the Girls were to be kept in the playground that morning—at Physical Jerks. She hadn’t ever put up with much in the way of patronage from the rather untidy-haired bookish branch of the establishment. Still, accomplished Classicist as she once had been, she had had to acknowledge that the bookish branch of a School was what you might call the Senior Service.
