She had discovered that the best plan was to stand side by side with the children in face of the things they had to learn, treating them as equals and fellow-adventurers, giving explanations when these were necessary, as if they were obvious and might have been discovered by the children themselves, never as if they were possessions of her own, to be imparted, never claiming a knowledge superior to their own. “The business of the teacher is to make the children independent, to get them to think for themselves, and that’s much more important than whether they get to know facts,” she would say irrelevantly to the Pernes whenever the question of teaching came up. She bitterly resented their vision of children as malleable subordinates. And there were many moments when she seemed to be silently exchanging this determination of hers with her pupils. Good or bad, she knew it was the secret of her influence with them, and so long as she was faithful to it both she and they enjoyed their hours together. Very often she was tired, feeble with fatigue and scamping all opportunities; this too they understood and never took advantage of her. One or two of them would even when she failed try to keep things going on her own method. All this was sheer happiness to her, the bread and wine of her days.
But now and again, perhaps during the mid-morning recess, this impersonal relationship gave way and the children clung fawning all round her, passionately competing for nearness, touching and clinging and snatching for kisses. There was no thought or uprightness or laughter then, their hands were quick and eloquent and their eyes wide and deeply smiling with those strange women’s smiles. Sometimes she could respond in kind, answering to their smiles and caresses, making gentle foolish sounds and feeling their passion rise to a frenzy of adoration. The little deprecating consoling sounds that they made as they clung told her that if she chose steadily to remain always gentle and deprecating and consoling and reproachful she could dominate them as persons and extort in the long run a complete personal obedience to herself, so that they would do their work for her sake and live by and through her, adoring her—as a goddess—and hating her. Even as they fawned she knew they were fighting between their aching desire for a perfection of tenderness in her and their fear lest she should fulfil the desire. She was always tempted for an instant to yield and fling herself irrevocably into the abyss, letting the children go on one by one into the upper school, carrying as her gift only a passionate memory such as she herself had for one of her nursemaids; leaving her downstairs with an endless succession of new loves, different, but always the same. She would become like a kind of nun, making a bare subsistence, but so beloved always, so quivering and tender and responsive that human love would never fail her, and when strength failed there would be hands held out to shelter her decline. But the vision never held her for more than a moment. There was something in the thought of such pure personal sentiment that gave her a feeling of treachery towards the children. Mentally she flung them out and off, made them stand upright and estranged. She could not give them personal love. She did not want to; nor to be entangled with them. They were going to grow up into North London women, most of them loudly scorning everything that was not materially profitable; these would remember her with pity—amusement. A few would escape. These would remember her at strange moments that were coming for them, moments when they would recognise the beauty of things like the “Psalm of Life” that she had induced them to memorise without understanding it.
This morning a sense of their softness and helplessness went to her heart. She had taught them so little. But she had forced them to be impersonal. Almost savagely she had done that. She had never taken them by a trick. …
And now they were going to be Julia’s children.
Julia would teach them—alone there in the room with them, filling the room for them—in her own way. …
There would be no more talk about general ideas. …
She would have to keep on the “object” lessons, because the Pernes had been so pleased with the idea and the children had liked them. There would still be those moments, with balls for the solar system and a candle for the sun, and the blinds down. But there would not be anything like that instant when all the eyes round the table did nothing but watch the movement of a shadow on a ball … the relief afterwards, the happiness and the moment of intense love in the room—never to be forgotten, all of them knowing each other, all their differences gone away, even the clever watchful eyes of the cheating little Jewess, real and unconscious for a moment. Julia would be watching the children as much as the shadow, and the children would never quite forget Julia. She would get to know a great deal about the children, but there would be no reverence for big cold outside things. She would teach them to be kind. “Little dorlings.” She thought all children were darlings and talked to them all in her wheedling, coaxing, adoring way. If one or two were not, it was the fault of the way they were treated, something in the “English” way of dealing with them. Nearly all the elder girls she disapproved of, they were no longer children—they were English. She was full of contempt and indignant laughter for them, and of pity for the “wee things” who were growing up. Yet she got on with them all and had the secret of managing them without letting them see her feelings.
There was something specially bad in the English way of bringing up children.
