IV
During her second week of giving the children their morning’s lessons Miriam saw finally that it was impossible and would always be impossible to make their two hours of application anything but an irrelevant interval in their lives. They came into the schoolroom with languid reluctance, dreamily indolent from breakfast in bed, fragrant from warm baths. They made no resistance. She sat with the appointed tasks clearly in mind, holding on to the certainty that they were to be done as the only means of getting through the morning. The excitement of taking up everything afresh with her was over and beyond occasional moments of brightness when she tried to impress a fact or lift them over a difficulty with a jest and they would exchange their glance of secret delight, their curious conspirators’ glance of some great certainty shared, they went through their tasks with well-bred preoccupation, sighing deeply now and again and sometimes groaning, with clenched hands pressed between their knees. Their accustomed life of events was close round them, in the garden just beyond the undraped window, on the mat outside the schoolroom door, where at any moment a footstep crossing the landing might fall softly and pause, when their heads would go up in tense listening. “Rollo!” they would say, waiting for the turning of the handle, holding themselves in for the subdued shoutings they would utter when Mrs. Corrie appeared standing in the doorway with a finger on her lips. “Happy?” she would breathe; “working like nigger boys?” Unless Miriam looked gravely detached she would glide in blushing, and passionately caress them. When this happened, sighs and groanings filled the time that remained. Their nearest approach to open rebellion included a tacit appeal to her as a fellow-sufferer to throw up the stupid game. It was quite clear that they did not blame her for their sufferings and they were so much prepared to do the decent thing that her experiment of reading to them regularly at some convenient half-hour each day from a book of adventures or fairy tale, not only reconciled them to endure the morning’s ordeal, but filled them with a gratitude that astonished her and the beginnings of a personal regard for her that shook her heart. During the readings they would lose their air of well-bred detachment and would come near. They would be relaxed and silent; the girl with bent head and brooding defiant curiously smiling and frowning face, the boy gazing at the reader, rapturous. She would sometimes feel against each arm the pressure of a head.
She had felt instinctively and at once that she could not use their lesson hours as opportunities for talking at large on general ideas as she had done with the children in the Banbury Park school. Those children, the children of tradesmen most of them, could be allowed to take up the beginnings of ideas; “ideals,” the sense of modern reforms, they could be allowed to discuss anything from any point of view and take up attitudes and have opinions. The opportunity for discussion and for encouraging a definite attitude towards life was much greater in this quiet room with only the two children; but it would have been mean, Miriam felt, to take advantage of this opportunity; to be anything but strictly neutral and wary of generalisations. It would have been so easy. Probably a really “conscientious” woman would have done it, have “influenced” them, given the girl a bias in the direction of some life of devotion, hospital nursing or slum missionary work, and have filled the boy with ideas as to the essential superiority of “Radicals.” Their minds were so soft and untouched. … It ended in a conspiracy, they all sat masquerading, and finished their morning exhausted and relieved. The children knew the lessons tortured her and made her ill at ease, and they were puzzled without disapproving. Through it all she felt their gratitude to her for not being “simple,” like Bunnikin.
There was to be another weekend. Again there would be the sense of being a visitor amongst other visitors; visitor was not the word; there was a French word which described the thing, “convive,” “les convives” … people sitting easily about a table with flushed faces … someone standing drunkenly up with eyes blazing with friendliness and a raised wineglass … women and wine, the roses of Heliogabalus; but he was a Greek and dreadful in some way, convives were Latin, Roman; fountains, water flowing over marble, white-robed strong-faced people reclining on marble couches, feasting … taking each fair mask for what it shows itself; that was what this kind of wealthy English people did, perhaps what all wealthy people did … the maimed, the halt, the blind, compel them to come in … but that was after the others had
