Backwater

farm somewhere far away. Of course it was dreadful for her to be a farmer’s daughter. She evidently knew it herself and said very little about it. But her large red hands, so strange handling schoolbooks, were comforting; and her holland apron with its bib under the fresh colouring of her face⁠—do you like butter? A buttercup under your chin⁠—brought to Miriam a picture of the farm, white amidst bright greenery, with a dairy and morning cockcrow and creamy white sheep on a hillside. It was all there with her as she sat at table reading “The Lamplighter.” The sound of her broad husky voice explaining to Miss Jenny had been full of it. But it was all past. She too had come to Banbury Park. She did not seem to mind Banbury Park. She was to study hard and be a governess. She evidently thought she was having a great chance⁠—she was fifteen and quite “uncultured.” How could she be turned into a governess? A sort of nursery governess, for farms, perhaps. But farms did not want books and worry. Miriam wanted to put her back into her farm, and sometimes her thoughts wearily brushed the idea of going with her. Perhaps, though, she had come away because her father could not keep her? The little problem hung about her as she sat sweetly there, common and good and strong. The golden light that seemed to belong specially to her came from a London garden, an unreal North London garden. Resounding in its little spaces were the blatterings and shouts of the deaf and dumb next door.

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Miss Jenny left The Standard with Miriam after tea, stopping suddenly as she made her uncertain way from the tea-table to the door and saying absently, “Eh, you’d better read this, my dear. There’s a leader on the Education Commission. Would ye like to? Yes, I think you’d better.” Miriam accepted the large sheets with hesitating expressions of thanks, wondering rather fearfully what a leader might be and where she should find it. She knew the word. Her mother read “the leaders” in the evening⁠—“excellent leader” she sometimes said, and her father would put down his volume of Proceedings of the British Association, or Herbert Spencer’s First Principles, and condescendingly agree. But any discussion generally ended in his warning her not to believe a thing because she saw it in print, and a reminder that before she married she had thought that everything she saw in print was true, and quite often he would go on to general remarks about the gullibility of women, bringing in the story of the two large long-necked pearly transparent drawing-room vases with stems and soft masses of roses and leaves painted on their sides that she had given too much for at the door to a man who said they were Italian. Brummagem, Brummagem, he would end, mouthing the word and turning back to his book with the neighing laugh that made Miriam turn to the imagined picture of her mother in the first year of her married life, standing in the sunlight at the back door of the Babington house, with the varnished coach-house door on her right and the cucumber frames in front of her sloping up towards the bean-rows that began the kitchen garden; with her little scallopped bodice, her hooped skirt, her hair bunched in curls up on her high pad and falling round her neck, looking at the jugs with grave dark eyes. And that neighing laugh had come again and again all through the years until she sat meekly, flushed and suffering under the fierce gaslight, feeling every night of her life winter and summer as if the ceiling were coming down on her head, and read “leaders” cautiously, and knew when they were written in “a fine chaste dignified style.” But that was The Times. The Standard was a penny rag and probably not worth considering at all. In any case she would not read it at evening study. She had never had a newspaper in her hand before as far as she could remember. The girls would see that she did not know how to read it, and it would be snubby towards them to sit there as if she were a Miss Perne, scrumpling a great paper while they sat with their books. So she read her textbooks, a page of Saxon Kings with a ten-line summary of each reign, a list of six English counties with their capitals and the rivers the capitals stood on and the principal industries of each town, devising ways of remembering the lists and went on to Bell’s Standard Elocutionist. She had found the book amongst the school books on the schoolroom shelves. It was a “standard” book and must therefore be about something she ought to know something about if she were to hold her own in this North London world. There had been no “standard” books at school and the word offended her. It suggested fixed agreement about the things people ought to know and that she felt sure must be wrong, and not only wrong but “common”⁠ ⁠… standard readers⁠ ⁠… standard pianoforte tutors. She had learned to read in Reading Without Tears, and gone on to Classical Poems and Prose for the Young, her arithmetic book instead of being a thin cold paper-covered thing called Standard I, had been a pleasant green volume called Barnard Smith, that began at the beginning and went on to compound fractions and stocks. There was no Morris’s Grammar at Banbury Park, no Wetherell or English Accidence, no bits from Piers Plowman and pages of scraps of words with the way they changed in different languages and quotations, just sentences that had made her long for more⁠ ⁠… “up-clomb”⁠ ⁠… “the mist up-clomb.” She opened Bell’s Standard Elocutionist apprehensively, her mind working on possible meanings for elocutionist. She thought of ventriloquist