The Headmistress

CHAPTER IThe pretty and formerly peaceful village of Harefield lies in a valley watered by the upper reaches of the River Rising, under the downs. The Rising, here no more than a stream, flows in many silvery channels through the rushy meadows to the north of the village. The wide High Street is on a slant. The houses on the north or lower side have gardens that run down towards the water meadows. The south side, where the houses are larger and look away over the north side to the hills beyond, has gardens running gently uphill and bounded at their further end by the grounds of Harefield Park, a plain-faced Palladian house which stands connected by a covered arcade with a pavilion on each side, commanding but a little gaunt, half a mile or so away from the village. Here have lived for a hundred and fifty years or so the Belton family, pleasant undistinguished people who burst into comparative affluence with a nabob under the Honourable East India Company and have been gently declining ever since. This decline was attributed by Mr. Carton, a middle-aged Oxford don of a genealogical turn of mind who lived at Harefield out of term and liked “going into families” as he called it, to their having married more for love than for money or lands. The result had been a very happy home life, the right number of sons for Army, Navy, colonial service, law and other useful public work, and nice daughters who had usually married younger sons or clergymen, so that the Beltons were as much interrelated with the county as any other family in Barsetshire. They also owned some of the fine red-brick houses in the town and had always farmed their own land. But gentleman-farming is no inheritance and by the time the war settled down upon the world the Beltons were living on overdrafts to an extent that even they found alarming, and two years later were unhappily making up their minds to sell a house and estate for which there would probably be no demand, when Providence kindly intervened, in the shape of the Hosiers’ Girls’ Foundation School. This old and very wealthy city company supported two excellent schools. The boys’ school had been evacuated at the beginning of the war to Southbridge, but was now back in London. The girls’ school had gone to Barchester and had a working arrangement with the Barchester High School. Their school buildings in London had been almost completely demolished in 1940, so they remained in Barchester. Their parents, who were mostly doing pretty well, were so glad to find their daughters healthy and happy that when they had also realized the great joy of only seeing them in the holidays, instead of five days in the week from half-past four in the afternoon to nine o’clock in the morning, not to speak of all Saturday and Sunday, most of them gladly agreed to their remaining as boarders. If this decision had been made earlier in the war it would have been easier to find a house, but now, what with Government offices, insurance companies (which had an insatiable appetite for country mansions), banks, hospitals and the Forces, there was not a good house available in the district. Miss Sparling the headmistress spent all her week-ends looking at impossible places and grew more and more anxious. Not only did she wish to please her employers, with whom she was on excellent terms, but her heart sank at the thought of another year, nay even another term, in Barchester. Not that she was unpopular. The Close had taken her to its bosom and the professional families much enjoyed her company, but she was not happy. Soon after the Hosiers’ Girls came to Barchester Miss Pettinger, the headmistress of the Barchester High School, had very graciously pressed Miss Sparling to stay with her. Miss Sparling, worn out by a succession of rooms and landladies each more repellent than the last, had gratefully accepted this invitation and eternally regretted that she had done so. It was not that she was starved, or beaten, or given an iron bedstead with a thin mattress, or made to sit below the salt, but there was something about Miss Pettinger that made her whole life acutely uncomfortable. What it had meant to be at close quarters with Miss Pettinger for two years, only Miss Sparling knew, though many of Miss Pettinger’s ex-pupils could have voiced her feelings; notably Mrs. Noel Merton, now living at her old home near Northbridge, who went so far as to remark to Miss Lavinia Merton, aged six months, that if she didn’t hush her, hush her and not fret her, that old beast Pettinger would in all probability get her. Then, one Sunday afternoon at the Deanery, the Archdeacon’s wife from Plumstead happened to mention that Lady Pomfret had told her that she heard the Beltons were going to try to let the Park. Miss Sparling, always with the welfare of her school at heart and spurred by the ever-springing hope of getting away from Miss Pettinger’s society, rang up her employers that night. Within forty-eight hours the Hosiers’ solicitor had telephoned to Mr. Belton, come down to Barchester with a surveyor in his train, extracted a car and petrol from the Old Cathedral Garage, seen Mr. Belton’s lawyer, been all over the house with Miss Sparling and the surveyor, and gone back to London. Within a fortnight the Beltons had moved into the village, workmen had been produced, the necessary alterations made, and by the beginning of the autumn term Miss Sparling was installed at Harefield Park with her staff, her girls, and a delightful little suite of her own in the West Pavilion. No longer would she have to listen to Miss Pettinger’s views on politics or her account of her motor trip in Dalmatia; no longer would she be cross-examined as to the probable results of her girls in the School Certificate examination; no longer would she have to hear herself introduced with a bright laugh as “my evacuee, but so different, quite an old friend now”; no longer—but when she came to think about it, she could not honestly say that Miss Pettinger had ever been spiteful, ungenerous or unkind in word or deed. It was only that she simply could not abide that lady; and here again Mrs. Noel Merton would have entirely agreed with her. Most luckily Arcot House, a small but handsome house in the village belonging to Mr. Belton, fell vacant about this time, owing to the death of old Mrs. Admiral Ellangowan-Hornby. That lady, the daughter of a Scotch peer, had a taste for white walls, good furniture and ferocious cleanliness, so when her heir, a nephew who did not in the least wish to live there, suggested that the owners might like to take it furnished, very little was needed in the way of preparation, and a few days before school reassembled Mr. and Mrs. Belton, who had been living at the Nabob’s Head at the upper end of the village, walked quietly down the High Street and entered Arcot House. In the drawing-room, which commanded the village street in front and the garden with a distant view of Harefield Park at the back, a bright fire was burning, the furniture caught the gleam of the flames, Mrs. Admiral Ellangowan-Hornby’s Scotch ancestors and ancestresses looked down with immense character from the walls, and tea was laid. A tall, plain, middle-aged woman who looked like a cross between a nurse and a housekeeper, as indeed she was, came in with a kettle and set it down by the fire. “That’s in case you wanted any more hot water, madam,” she said. “And Mr. Freddy telephoned to say he’d be here any time, and Miss Elsa telephoned to say she might turn up to-night or to-morrow morning, and Mr. Charles did ring up but I couldn’t hear what he said, but Gertie Pilson at the exchange says if he rings up again she’ll take the message herself. I’ve got all the beds ready and Hurdles says he’ll see there’s a nice bit of meat if it’s for the Commander and I was to tell you he’ll get you something nice off the ration if Miss Elsa comes and Pratt’s got some lovely kippers Mr. Charles can have for his breakfast. I lighted the fire and there’s enough coal in the old lady’s cellars to last six months and plenty of wood in the park so don’t you worry.” Having issued these orders of the day, the woman turned on her heel and left the room, not exactly slamming the door, but shutting it with a degree of firmness which anyone unaccustomed to her ways might have taken as a sign of ill-temper. Her master and mistress (by courtesy), who were used to her ways, remained unmoved. When Mrs. Belton was engaging a nurse before the birth of her first child, a young woman had applied for the post who was so obviously the right person to rule a nursery that young Mrs. Belton had engaged her almost without inquiry. Her family was well known and respected in Harefield, her uncle Sid Wheeler being landlord of the Nabob, her cousin Bill Wheeler a first-class chimney sweep and the only person who really understood the chimneys at Pomfret Towers, and her mother an excellent laundress. Her father chiefly lived on his wife, supplemented with odd jobs, but as Harefield, like many villages, was at bottom matriarchal, no one thought much the worse of him. When asked her name the young woman had said Wheeler; and on being pressed had grudgingly admitted to S. Wheeler, adding that she was properly christened and didn’t wish to say no more, and such was her strength of character that no one had ever dared to call her by anything but her surname. Mr. Carton, whose interest in genealogies and families boiled over in every possible direction, had given it as his opinion after spending several evenings at the Old Begum, an alehouse patronized by Mr. Wheeler père, that her dislike of her name being known, while largely based on a fine primitive feeling that by letting your name be known you gave unknown powers a handle over you, was also due to a class feeling that upper servants, such as butlers and head parlourmaids, were always called by their surname and one was not going to demean oneself before such. Therefore into the nursery she had come as Wheeler, and Wheeler she had remained. By such interfering and inquisitorial visitations as censuses and later identity cards and ration books, not to speak of her mother when she brought the personal wash up to the Park, or general conversation in the village, it had long been known that her name was Sarah, but no one had ever dared to use it. Even Charles Belton, her latest and best-loved nursling, had only once, flown with a century made for Harefield v. Pomfret Madrigal on the home ground, attempted to call her Sarah and had been so awfully set down in the tea marquee, in front of both teams, that he had never tried again. “Why so many cups and saucers, do you suppose, Lucy?” said Mr. Belton, who had been studying the tea equipage in silence. His wife looked at the table, where six or seven cups, saucers and plates of delicate china were set out. “I can’t think,” she said. “But I’m very glad Wheeler is going to be our houseparlourmaid. Anyone else would break that china at once, and Mrs. Ellangowan-Hornby’s nephew might go to law about it, for we could never replace it and it’s probably worth a million pounds. Come and have your tea, Fred, and use one of them. How funny it is to be living in someone else’s house.” “Only leasehold. My house if you come to think of it,” said Mr. Belton, who held strong views about property, though a very long-suffering landlord with his small tenants. “My house twice over if it comes to that. Property belongs to me and I’m tenant of the old lady’s nephew as well.” “I wonder what Captain Hornby is like,” said Mrs. Belton, sitting down at Captain Hornby’s table, in his chair, and beginning to pour out tea from his teapot. “Like?” said her husband. “Like anyone else I suppose. Where’s my saccharine? Where is my saccharine? Damn the filthy stuff. Can’t think why old What’s-his-name in Harley Street told me to take it. Partner in a saccharine factory probably. That’s the way all these doctors live.”