Their strong indifference seemed to centre in the cold pale scornful face of Jessie Wheeler, sitting squarely there with defiant eyes, waiting for the future; the little troop of children she dreamed of.
These North London girls would be scornful mocking fiancées. They would be adored by their husbands. Secretly they would forget their husbands in their houses and children and friends.
Julia was the last player. She sidled swiftly out of the room; even her habitual easy halting lounge seemed to have deserted her; and almost at once, slow and tragic and resignedly weeping came the opening notes of Chopin’s Funeral March. Sitting in the front row of the little batch of children from the lower school who faced the room from the window bay, Miriam saw, in fancy, Julia’s face as she sat at the drawing-room piano—the face she had when she talked of the woods and the sea. The whole of the long march, including the major passage, was the voice of Julia’s strange desolation. She played painfully, very slowly and carefully, with tender respectful attention, almost without emphasis. She was not in the least panic-stricken; anyone could feel that; but she had none of the musical assurance that would have filled the girls with uneasy admiration and disgust. They were pleased and amused. And far away, Julia was alone with life and death. She made two worlds plain, the scornful world of the girls and her own shadow-filled life.
Miriam longed for the performance to be at an end so that the girls might reassert themselves.
An important stirring was going on at the little table where Miss Cramp sat with the Pernes; only their heads and shoulders showing above the piles of prize-books. Miss Perne stood up and faced the room smiling and gently muttering. Presently her voice grew clear and she was making little statements and pronouncing names, clearly and with gay tender emphasis, the names of tall bold girls in the first class. One by one they struggled to the table and stood gentle and disturbed with flushed enlightened faces. Not a single girl could stand unconcerned before Miss Perne. Even Polly Allen’s brow was shorn of its boldness.
The girls knew. They would remember something of what the Pernes had tried to give them.
The room was unbearably stuffy. The prize-giving was at an end. Miriam’s own children had struggled to the table and come back to her for the last time.
Miss Perne was making a little speech … about Miss Henderson’s forthcoming departure. Why did people do these formal things? She would be expected to make some response. For a moment she had the impulse to get up and rush away through the hall, get upstairs and pack and send for a four-wheeler. But from behind came hands dragging at a fold of her dress and the sound of Burra’s hard sobbing. She felt the child’s head bowed against her hip. A child at her side twisted its hands together and sat with its head held high, drawing sharp breaths. Miss Perne’s voice went on. She was holding up an umbrella, a terrible, expensive, silver-mounted one. The girls had subscribed.
Miriam sat with beating heart waiting for Miss Perne’s voice to cease, pressing back towards the support of Burra and other little outstretched clutchings and the general snuffling of her class, grappling with the amazement of hearing from various quarters of the room violent and repeated nose-blowings, and away near the door in the voice of a girl she had hardly spoken to a deep heavy contralto sobbing.
Presently she was on her feet with the tightly-rolled silken twist of the umbrella heavy in her hands. Her stiff lips murmured incoherent thanks in a strange thin voice—Harriett’s voice with the life gone from it.
Colophon
Backwater
was published in 1916 by
Dorothy M. Richardson.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Christopher Hapka,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2017 by
An Anonymous Volunteer
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Schoolgirls,
a painting completed in 1880 by
George Clausen.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
November 29, 2023, 4:52 p.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
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