It was then that things began to happen; moreover, they began at the least likely place in the whole of Lud-in-the-Mist—Miss Primrose Crabapple’s Academy for young ladies.
Miss Primrose Crabapple had for some twenty years “finished” the daughters of the leading citizens; teaching them to sing, to dance, to play the spinet and the harp, to preserve and candy fruit, to wash gauzes and lace, to bone chickens without cutting the back, to model groups of still life in every imaginable plastic material, edible and non-edible—wax, butter, sugar—and to embroider in at least a hundred different stitches—preparing them, in fact, to be one day useful and accomplished wives.
When Dame Marigold Chanticleer and her contemporaries had first been pupils at the Academy, Miss Primrose had only been a young assistant governess, very sentimental and affected, and full of nonsensical ideas. But nonsensical ideas and great practical gifts are sometimes found side by side, and sentimentality is a quality that rarely has the slightest influence on action.
Anyhow, the ridiculous gushing assistant managed bit by bit to get the whole direction of the establishment into her own hands, while the old dame to whom the school belonged became as plastic to her will as were butter, sugar or wax to her clever fingers; and when the old lady died she left her the school.
It was an old rambling redbrick house with a large pleasant garden, and stood a little back from the high road, about half a mile beyond the west gate of Lud-in-the-Mist.
The Academy represented to the ladies of Lud all that they knew of romance. They remembered the jokes they had laughed at within its walls, the secrets they had exchanged walking up and down its pleached alleys, far more vividly than anything that had afterwards happened to them.
Do not for a moment imagine that they were sentimental about it. The ladies of Lud were never sentimental. It was as an old comic song that they remembered their schooldays. Perhaps it is always with a touch of wistfulness that we remember old comic songs. It was at any rate as near as the ladies of Lud could get to the poetry of the past. And whenever Dame Marigold Chanticleer and Dame Dreamsweet Vigil and the rest of the old pupils of the Academy foregathered to eat syllabub and marzipan and exchange new stitches for their samplers, they would be sure sooner or later to start bandying memories about these funny old days and the ridiculous doings of Miss Primrose Crabapple.
“Oh, do you remember,” Dame Marigold would cry, “how she wanted to start what she called a ‘Mother’s Day,’ when we were all to dress up in white and green, and pretend to be lilies standing on our mothers’ graves?”
“Oh, yes!” Dame Dreamsweet would gurgle, “And mother was so angry when she found out about it. ‘How dare the ghoulish creature bury me alive like this?’ she used to say.”
And then they would laugh till the tears ran down their cheeks.
Each generation had its own jokes and its own secrets; but they were always on the same pattern; just as when one of the china cups got broken, it was replaced by another exactly like it, with the same painted border of squills and ivy.
There were squills and ivy all over the Academy, embroidered on the curtains in each bedroom, and on all the cushions and screens, painted in a frieze around the wall of the parlour, and even stamped on the pats of butter. For one of Miss Primrose Crabapple’s follies was a romantic passion for Duke Aubrey—a passion similar to that cherished by highchurch spinsters of the last century for the memory of Charles I. Over her bed hung a little reproduction in watercolours of his portrait in the Guildhall. And on the anniversary of his fall, which was kept in Dorimare as a holiday, she always appeared in deep mourning.
She knew perfectly well that she was an object of ridicule to her pupils and their mothers. But her manner to them was not a whit less gushing in consequence; for she was much too practical to allow her feelings to interfere with her bread and butter.
However, on the occasions when her temper got the better of her prudence she would show them clearly her contempt for their pedigree, sneering at them as commercial upstarts and interlopers. She seemed to forget that she herself was only the daughter of a Lud grocer, and at times to imagine that the Crabapples had belonged to the vanished aristocracy.
She was grotesque, too, in appearance, with a round moon face, tiny eyes, and an enormous mouth that was generally stretched into an ingratiating smile. She always wore a green turban and gown cut in the style of the days of Duke Aubrey. Sitting in her garden among her pretty little pupils she was like a brightly-painted Aunt Sally, placed there by a gardener with a taste for the baroque to frighten away the birds from his cherries and greengages.
Though it was flowers that her pupils resembled more than fruit—sweetpeas, perhaps, when fragrant, gay, and demure, in muslin frocks cut to a pattern, but in various colours, and in little poke-bonnets with white frills, they took their walk, two and two, through the streets of Lud-in-the-Mist.
At any rate it was something sweet and fresh that they suggested, and in the town they were always known as the “Crabapple Blossoms.”
Recently they had been in a state of gleeful ecstasy. They had reason to believe that Miss Primrose was being courted, and by no less a person than Endymion Leer.
He was the school physician, and hence to them all a familiar figure. But, until quite lately, Miss Primrose had been a frequent victim of his relentless tongue, and many a time a little patient had been forced to stuff the sheet into
