The Doll Maker

1

“Paston Hall, with its beautiful and extensive grounds,” so ran the Prospectus, “stands in a high and healthy situation, and while the School is surrounded on all sides by charmingly wooded, unspoilt country which ensures complete tranquillity, communication with the pleasant old−world market−town of Pentabridge is easy and regular.... The girls are encouraged to lead a varied outdoor life, which includes gardening, games and riding, under careful supervision.... Particular attention is paid to individual training in habits of mind and person, such as intelligent observation, initiative, acceptance of responsibility.... Entire charge is taken of pupils whose parents are abroad.”

These phrases, and particularly the last, were present in the mind of Clare Lydgate, one December night, as she crossed on tiptoe the dark Prefects' Room on the ground−floor of Paston Hall and gently drew back the oiled window−catch. She saw Miss Sperrod carefully selecting which words to underline on the shiny glazed paper and was revolted by the hypocrisy which, quite recently, she had discovered to be the main element in the Principal's character and the main component of the atmosphere she had been breathing for the last five years.

Clare climbed out of the Prefects' Room window and drew it quietly to behind her. The night was moonless, but the unclouded stars thinned the darkness so that gravel paths and grass and the bulks of trees were just distinguishable. In two long strides on the tips of her gym−shoes she crossed the loose gravel of the path and gained the grass, where footfalls were silent. She glanced back at the school building once to make sure that all the windows on her side were dark, then walked slowly, but with the confidence of one to whom the place was wholly familiar by night, across the short grass of the grounds.

She went with bent head, neither observing the rare embroidery of the black sky above her nor heeding the small night sounds of creatures awake in the school grounds and in the woods beyond the walls. The charmingly wooded, unspoilt country surrounding the school was as little known to Clare, or any of the Paston Hall girls, as was the pleasant, old−world market−town of Pentabridge. In claiming the countryside as one of the school's amenities Miss Sperrod did not mention the rule which strictly forbade her pupils to go about in it except in safe numbers under the eye of a Mistress. The Principal calculated that most parents, and especially those who perspire in the tropics, subscribe vaguely to a Wordsworthian doctrine of the beneficial influence of Nature in England on the growing child; but Miss Sperrod was aware of other influences lurking as much in the nearly unspoilt village of Halliwell as in the cinema and palais de danse of the old−world market−town, which, though they were native enough to English soil, were likely to produce effects on her pupils which would be sharply reflected in her accounts. The temptations of Pentabridge were, indeed, the lesser danger, for the town was six miles from Paston Hall, and the “easy and regular communication” consisted, in fact, of a contract with the County Bus Company to convey pupils to and from the railway−station when necessary. In an emergency girls might be taken to the town, suitably escorted, in a taxi, but most of them saw nothing of Pentabridge except its railway−station at the beginning and end of term.

Clare Lydgate had not even enjoyed that excursion this autumn term. She was one of those of whom entire charge was taken during the holidays. In the past she had accepted the position philosophically enough, for her father had had a long contract at the Rio Tinto copper−mines and she had been able to go to Spain for the summer and Christmas holidays, and the shorter Easter and Whitsun holidays and the half−terms at Paston Hall were endurable. Now, however, her father was in Malaya; it was impossible to go out there for the holidays. Neither her father nor her mother had any near relatives in England with whom she could stay; and so, for Clare, there had been not terms, but one long term, stretching unbroken in all but the incidence of lessons, from the last Christmas holidays to these. To make matters worse, the clique of friends who in the past had shared internment at Easter and half−term holidays with her was now broken up. Clare was eighteen; she would have left Paston Hall at the end of the last summer term with her contemporaries but for her father's insistence that she sit for an Oxford scholarship.

The Prospectus declared that girls were “prepared for School Certificate, Higher Certificate and entrance to the Universities”. Only dimly aware what an unexpected asset she had proved to the Principal, and the small Governing Body which discreetly made a living out of Paston Hall, Clare had by native intelligence and wide reading satisfied the examiners for the two Certificates and set a record in the annals of the School. Perhaps the flush of this triumph, which was naturally the School's, and the novelty of finding one of the awkward little creatures in whom she dealt actually co−operating with her in her patient and subtle task of drawing fees from parents' pockets, had gone to Miss Sperrod's head and led her to encourage Mr Lydgate's design and foster his belief that Clare could be coached at Paston Hall up to the standard required for a scholarship to Oxford. She was, no doubt, for one occasion in her life, the victim of immediate influences; there was the recent glory of a Higher Certificate, there was the flattery of Mr Lydgate's letter, there was Clare's own ambition and seeming promise, and, finally, there was Miss Otterel.

The Principal had engaged Annie Otterel through a scholastic agency. She was very young, without any teaching experience and without a Teaching Certificate; but she had a degree in History and she was under the necessity of finding a job promptly on going down from London University. She impressed Miss Sperrod with her inside knowledge of the higher academic world—almost as the conversation of a minor canon might impress a tailor who valued the custom of the Chapter—and she inspired Clare with yearning for the delights of University life.

So, convinced though she was that an excess of zeal is the worst of all excesses, the Principal had allowed herself to be carried away by her junior mistress's enthusiasm: Clare was to be specially coached by Miss Otterel, B.A.; the extra fees were assured and the increment of prestige appeared more than a possibility. As for Clare herself, it seemed to her that the heavens had opened; a goddess had descended upon Paston Hall—that all the girls frankly acknowledged from Miss Otterel's first day among them, but Clare was to be distinguished among the general congregation of worshippers and admitted to the goddess's particular intimacy throughout long, private hours of delightful study and confidence.

Then, before the autumn term began, Miss Otterel had died.

Standing in the Principal's sitting−room, watching Miss Sperrod's thin, rapidly−working lips, and listening with a kind of sullen helplessness to her embarrassed, glib, over−emphatic explanation, Clare was slow to grasp the news the Principal told her that morning. When she did she was shocked more by her discovery of the Principal's attitude than by the fact she was attempting to convey. Clare's real revolt against Paston Hall began that morning.

Incredulously, she saw that Miss Sperrod was neither shocked nor grieved at the death itself, only apprehensive. Her gabble of words had an exculpatory undertone, as if she were refuting in anticipation an imputation that the School might in some way be held to be concerned in Anne Otterel's death.

“Of course, it's seven weeks since she left,” the Principal repeated. “She went up to town the day we broke up. She was absolutely fit when she left; I remember distinctly noticing how well she looked after the summer term here. I remember Matron remarking to me how much better she looked than when she came at the beginning of the Easter term. That's what's so dreadful about that disease. The healthiest person can pick up the infection; and the incubation period is really frightfully short, so I'm told. She could have picked it up travelling in the train back to Pentabridge, or with the people she was staying with. They've had quite a number of cases in Pentabridge. It was a question whether the High School shouldn't be closed last term. Two children at least died, I know....”

Clare escaped and tried to obtain a clearer account of the facts from Miss Geary, the one assistant mistress who had stayed at Paston Hall throughout the summer holiday. In the interval which elapsed before she found her, Clare began to feel the full weight of the news. She had not known death before. With it, a strange importance seemed to have shouldered its way bulkily into Paston Hall's affairs and into Clare's own life. She had been living through the summer holiday in a kind of mellow haze of anticipation, gilding the term to come with fancies of delight. Death blew the haze away and revealed a drabness stretching endlessly onward.

At once the attractions of study and the possibility of success seemed to disappear with Anne's death. Special work for the Oxford scholarship now resolved itself into a mere continuance of the dispiriting sequence of lessons she had been groaning through for the last five years. With a new, ruthless clarity of vision she saw that to sit for the scholarship without the coaching of someone like Anne was folly; she accepted the defeat, but she was bewildered and bruised in mind by the tragic excess of the power that had been used to obliterate her dream; she could not yet see her little defeat as a mere incident in a monstrous thing's passage.

Miss Geary was an aboriginal: a teacher at Paston Hall since its foundation. Successive generations of new girls had unquestioningly accepted from their seniors her nick−name of “Queery” and with it the traditional belief that she was not in perfect possession of all her faculties. The juniors, instructed by school−girl literature, approved an eccentric and gratefully diverted themselves with all the little peculiarities of her appearance, her dress, her voice and her absent−minded habits; the Middle School subscribed to a theory that she was a poor relation of one of the Governors, and treated her with the scorn proper to her situation; the Seniors, when they thought about her at all, dismissed her as a poor old thing.

When Clare, concealing the lesser death that had occurred in her own heart, asked bluntly what Miss Otterel had died of, the old lady stroked away her straight grey hair from her brow, narrowed her eyes and held back her head as if regarding Clare from very far away, from one of the remote plateaux of reverie where she spent most of her waking hours; then, suddenly descending the cliffs, as it were, bent her head, and articulated precisely:

“Infantile paralysis. It's become serious in Pentabridge.” She nodded and was about to walk on.

“But,” said Clare, detaining her boldly and speaking with the authority of her unhappiness, “what was she doing in Pentabridge? Why didn't she go home for the holidays?”

Miss Geary retreated to her plateau.

“I haven't the least idea,” she murmured, addressing someone, it seemed, invisible to Clare.

The term began; the girls came back, but not Clare's generation. The new Sixth Form seemed to her impossibly young, garrulous and stupid. She had not the patience to learn their slang or the intricacies of their internal relations. She constituted a form by herself and the others were slightly in awe of her. They left her alone.

The gap of the summer holiday and the substitution of a new Sixth Form for the familiar crowd with whom she had come up in the school put the previous summer term at a vastly greater distance from her than a mere eight weeks of calendar time. She looked at the few notes Anne Otterel had made for her at the end of the last term, looked at the programme of study they had fleetingly discussed, and the ideas and projects they represented seemed to her to belong to another life, as unassimilable with this as those distinct, isolated existences she had led in summer months in Spain long ago.

Miss Sperrod made spasmodic, bright pretences to plan Clare's studies, and Miss Geary, in a discursive way, took on the supervision of her French reading; but none of this carried conviction. The plain fact stared Clare bleakly in the face every time she sat down to her books, that there was no one at Paston Hall now who had the least conception of what was necessary for a scholarship examination. She had until the following Easter to find her own way about the ground to be covered for the syllabus, and she recognised that she was completely lost.

For a time she persisted, in a mechanical fashion, with the programme Miss Otterel had sketched out for her; but without Miss Otterel's presence and the stimulating desire to please her, she slipped little by little into reading only the things that immediately interested her, leaving the rest. By the end of the autumn term her reading was almost exclusively the English novelists and modern English and French poets. The French classical dramatists bored her, and the Latin she had to acquire baffled her. There had never been a Latin teacher at Paston Hall. Arrangements had been made for the very few girls who needed enough to scrape through the School Certificate examination to be coached by a mistress from Pentabridge High School, who came one or two evenings during the week in the terms when Miss Sperrod was entering a candidate. Clare had somehow managed to reach a pass standard two years before, but what she had learned then had since fled. She had secretly resolved to work her utmost with Miss Otterel: to learn the whole Latin Primer by heart, if need be; to read and translate ten verses of Vergil every day, to make the Odes of Horace her own. She looked at her books now and saw all the dreary, unrewarding grind she would have to undertake alone, and abandoned the project in despair.

It was in this mood of defeat that, one night late in the autumn term, she did something she had not done for four years. She crept down from her room after eleven o'clock, climbed out of the Prefects' Room window and prowled about the grounds for two or three hours. Once it had been an adventurous secret, closely guarded among her gang of friends. In the Third Form they had discovered that it was easy to get out by this particular window. They had taken care to keep the catch oiled, and they had a route across the lawn outside which took them quickly out of sight from any windows of the school. About once a week they climbed out and picnicked in the small wood at the bottom of the grounds; the gardener's boy was suborned to bring them sausages and eggs and tea from Halliwell village, and they had found a place by the wall where they could make a fire without the slightest danger of its light being seen from the school. For four or five terms, summer and winter, the gang kept up the practice; then, at their metamorphosis into Middle−School girls, the adventure became insipid and a little ridiculous to them and they abandoned it. But their secret was never discovered and never disclosed to any of the juniors following them on through the school.

Clare reverted to it simply because the most urgent need in her life now was to get away from Paston Hall. Her longing to have a life of her own, a place of her own, some privacy and freshness, something untainted by school and Miss Sperrod's influence, had become intolerably strong. The bedroom, which, as Head−Girl, she had to herself, was her own, but it was too cramped; its scratched furniture, worn rug and pencilled woodwork were too recently inherited; they smelled of school. The grounds were spacious, but the pseudo−Gothic turrets and gables of Paston Hall dominated them, and on one side a high bounding wall, on the other a gaunt iron fence, laid hard emphasis on the limits of freedom. Clare remembered from Third Form days how night changed the world and how those who ranged it made their own laws. The night could be one's own place of privacy and freedom and freshness. The Prefects' Room window still opened as silently as ever; she had but to push the catch to roam a kingdom that might be boundless.

This night of the Christmas holidays was the seventh or eighth she had spent in ranging the grounds since she heard the news of Anne's death. She found the great−girthed beech−tree by the wall between whose roots they had been used to make their fire, and sitting there she thought that she began to see her school life in its true proportions. The greater part of her five years had been a drab waste. She excepted entirely from her school life those few holidays in Spain: they were glittering bits of another existence altogether, chipped off and dropped by accident on to this dun expanse, this desert of time which she could almost perceive with her senses as she could feel and smell the peculiar cold stale stuffiness of a winter class−room. The only fun and excitement in that time had been those nocturnal adventures in the Third Form. They were pitiful enough, but they had been real; the risks had been real, and so had been the goodness of the red firelight, the smell of the woodsmoke and the taste of the sausages and the strong sweet tea that the Australian girl, Pamela, made in an enamelled can. She remembered those picnics kindlily now because they were a real escape. The independence and the high adventurous life Anne Otterel had seemed to beckon her to, had proved in the end only a glamour and a deception.

She stood up, cramped and cold from long sitting on the roots of the beech−tree and, though weary of her own discouragement, she was still unwilling to go back, out of the kingdom of the night into the prison of her narrow room. She stroked the smooth bark of the tree and, groping behind, stretched across and found the wall with her fingertips.

It was a high brick wall, much older than the Victorian building of the school. Clare knew that it was the original bounding wall of the neighbouring property, an old house called Brackenbine, which she had never seen. Some people by the name of Sterne lived, or had lived there, and, if the gardener was to be believed, they owned Paston Hall, which had been built seventy years before on part of their estate outside their old park wall. A modernising Sterne had built it, the gardener said, because the old house was small and dark and damp—“all smothered with great old trees and so slumped into the side of yon old Akenshaw Hill that the rabbits can run over the roof,” he said. Clare knew, too, that the School had not long tenanted Paston Hall. She had heard Miss Geary mention the days when it was known as Paston House and occupied three villas in a North London suburb. She had never been interested enough to speculate why the Sternes had left the new house and returned to the old one. It occurred to her now, with her new appraisal of Miss Sperrod's object in keeping a school, that the Sternes must have become hard−up and been obliged to let the Hall. They must, she thought, have let it very cheaply.

The bricks she touched were not those of the wall itself, but of a buttress. Each course was set a little back from the one below to give the necessary inclination to the top of the wall, and thus, Clare remembered well, it formed a steep stairway for the toes, by which, and by propping oneself with one arm against the beech−tree, the coping of the wall could be reached. They had done it often as Third−Formers, and sat astride the wall−top and looked into the gloom of the wood on the other side and talked about the house of Brackenbine which was hidden in it. Her toes seemed of their own will to find the first step on the buttress; she braced herself against the tree−trunk and in a few moments she had found a familiar hand−hold on a horizontal bough of the tree and had twisted herself on to the top of the wall. She settled herself there on the rounded coping; one leg in the school grounds, the other in Brackenbine wood.

It was pitch dark in the wood. A cold little wind crept through the bare trees and made a bough or two creak quietly. Clare pulled the belt of her coat tighter and blew into her gloved hands. In the old days there would have been a leaping of flames below, the crackling of dry twigs and a fine, bold sizzling of sausages, not this black loneliness of cold and the wandering of the uncomfortable wind. Clare groped with her toe for the foothold on the buttress in order to climb down again, but, as she half−turned, she saw a light among the trees of Brackenbine.

It was a little yellow spark of light, low down, near the ground. It went out a moment after Clare noticed it, but it was so odd that someone should be abroad in Brackenbine wood in the middle of a winter's night that Clare, secure in the darkness that mantled her, settled herself again on the wall−top and waited to see if it would reappear. It was not long before it winked again, and again it went out and quickly reappeared, as though someone were searching about among the trees with a lantern or a torch. The light seemed not to approach any nearer to the wall, but it winked and moved about quickly over a small area. It flitted so rapidly from side to side that Clare began to wonder whether it could be a lantern after all; doubtfully, she turned over the possibility that it was a will−o'−the−wisp. Then she saw the explanation: there was not one light but several; two or three shone for an instant together.

They were such tiny points of light, weaving so mazily in and out of the tree−trunks, that had Clare been in Spain she would have put them down as fireflies. She stared so hard that after a time she could not be sure how near or far they were from her; they might have been a number of lanterns far away, except that she had seen by daylight how thick Brackenbine wood was and knew that she would not see an ordinary lantern at all if it were any great distance from the wall. It seemed to her, all the same, that one of the lights was more powerful than the others; it gave a broader and more diffused glow, and suddenly, in some alarm, she realised that it was much nearer to the wall than she had thought, for she caught a glimpse of twigs and dead leaves faintly lit by it for a moment.

Cautiously she drew up her legs and slowly got to her feet on the wall−top in order to descend the buttress on her own side, but as she steadied herself against the beech−tree bough she put her weight on a thin dead branch which snapped with a loud crack. She lurched and clutched again at the bough, but the mortar of the old rounded coping−stone under her feet had all perished; the stone rocked and gave way, and though her hold on the bough saved her from pitching headlong down, her feet followed the stone and she swung helplessly over the Brackenbine side of the wall. Careless of the noise she made now, she tried to heave herself up again, but before she could find a foothold someone rushed over the dead leaves below, and a pair of arms winding swiftly round her waist plucked her from her hold and she was pressed down on her back into a bed of damp leaves and crackling, rotten twigs.

She had scarcely found breath to give a shout before her assailant's grip was relaxed and his weight lifted from her. Two hands under her shoulders lifted her to a sitting position and then one passed briefly over her head and face.

She heard a deep intake of breath and then an awkward little laugh.

“By Artemis!” a man's voice exclaimed softly. “A lady nighthawk! Has Diana turned bat−fowler, or are you simply Halliwell's first female poacher? I'll have you know, on the one supposition, that bats are sadly out of season; and, on the other, that there hasn't been a bird bagged at Brackenbine since my great−uncle Jabez blew a stuffed one out of the Bishop's wife's hat on the morning after the relief of Mafeking. Hoosh! Grim, sheathe your claws! This is my mouse!”

Clare, too breathless and astounded still for speech, tried to wriggle away from a set of small claws which had hooked themselves in her collar and a little rough tongue which was rasping determinedly at her neck. The man recovered his breath while still speaking; his voice was soft and bantering, but he held Clare down with a firm hand on her shoulder when she tried to rise.

“Not so fast!” he said. “Who are you, and what are you doing? Were you climbing in or out?”

Clare found her tongue. He had held her and talked just long enough for her first alarm to quieten; his voice was educated and young, and he sounded amused. He must, she guessed, as she gathered her wits, be one of the Sterne family. The fall on the dead leaves had not hurt her, and her indignation at his rough handling vanished with her physical fear; but it was followed by a more acute embarrassment and alarm of a different kind at being caught in such an escapade by someone who probably knew Miss Sperrod.

“I wasn't doing anything,” she said, in a voice that seemed to her own ear to speak directly out of Third−Form days. “I was trying to get back when you pulled me down.”

“I'll be bound you were! Why were you on our wall at all at this hour of the night, I'd like to know? If Miss Spoil−the−Child approves of these nocturnal exercises she should have warned us to expect an occasional—what shall I say?—involuntary invasion?”

“Spoil−the−Child?” Clare repeated, uncomprehending, and then, forgetting how foolish she felt, she laughed. “That's one we never thought of!” She paused and became uncomfortably aware again that the man's hand was still on her shoulder. “Well,” she said, very awkwardly, “you know where I come from. Will you please let me get up? I have to get back.”

“By cock−crow, you would imply?”

“No, before the housekeeper gets up,” Clare answered simply.

“Hm! If you hadn't scrabbled among those branches like a porcupine in a laundry−basket and plumped some−, thing solidly on to these dead leaves here, I might think” you a being less substantial than you claim to be. I'm only half convinced that you are one of Spare−the−Rod's little lodgers, for I've never known one before that had the nerve to prowl about the borders of Brackenbine by night. Besides, the place is closed for the holidays.”

There was so sharp a note of suspicion in the last words, that an anxious and disarming explanation tumbled at once from Clare's lips.

“I see,” he said slowly. “But I'm still not convinced. A sprite so shrewd as to take on the form of a schoolgirl would be sure to have an explanation for everything. I think I had better make sure of you by tracing a circle about you and reciting certain words of power to bind a spirit.”

He released her and she heard the dead leaves rustling a short way off. She scrambled to her feet and groped to find the wall.

“Don't run away,” said the man quietly. “I speak to the corporeal casing you may, or may not, have borrowed,” he went on. “You can't climb the wall on this side. And it's devilish dark in the wood. Whether that body is your own or not it won't thank you for a pair of barked shins and a broken nose.”

Clare stood bewildered. She had no idea of the layout of Brackenbine grounds; she knew only that the wood was wild and tangled and that, as he said, the wall was smooth and unclimbable on that side. She heard a slight metallic scraping and then found herself looking into the little yellow−lit window of an old−fashioned dark−lantern. The light moved regularly up and down and then proceeded slowly to circle her, while, with solemn and sonorous emphasis the man, whom she could not see in the dark behind the lantern, recited a litany of jargon. Clare saw her own form in the lantern−light and shrank, as she pivoted slowly with the circling flame, to think that the unseen eyes were examining her.

The circle was completed; the lantern was lowered to the ground, and Clare gave a sudden loud gasp of fright: two green eyes shone out at her from the shadow where the feeble rays failed. The man shifted the lantern slightly and revealed an enormous black cat sitting with upturned face, steadily regarding her. She had forgotten the small paws that pounced on her when she was thrown down on the leaves.

“Grim,” said the man, not addressing the cat, but introducing him. “Short for Grimalkin. He told me someone was about before you snapped that branch off.”

The man stood, entirely concealed in the dark and was silent for so long that Clare twisted her hands uneasily together, more puzzled, perhaps, than nervous, but wishing more and more to escape, while too acutely conscious of looking silly to make a dash into the wood. So she stood, as though the circle he had jokingly traced had indeed bound her to the spot.

“Well,” he said at length, “I do appreciate your anxiety to be off, and though there's a great deal I should like to ask you still, I won't take the risk of Spare−the−Rod's not doing so—metaphorically, of course. So, night−wandering sprite, I command you, or schoolgirl, I invite you, to return whence you came. Whichever you are you cannot choose but obey now the spell is cast.”

A momentarily−seen black shadow, he crossed the lantern's ray, bent down near the wall so that she could just make out his dark head, with face averted, and his two hands, with fingers interlocking, making a step for her to mount.

The unexpectedness and decisiveness of his act kept Clare rooted where she stood. Then he spoke, and she started, hurried to the wall, put her foot in the stirrup his hands made, and scrambled, careless of inelegance, to the top of the wall.

There, when she had twisted round and found the buttress with her toe, she regained self−possession enough to pause and say “Thank−you", but he had shut off the light and retreated into the black wood.

She lowered herself until her head was below the coping, and then, being back in the School territory, a frank, schoolgirl concern came to the surface of her feelings.

“I say,” she called over the wall. “You won't tell, will you?”

She listened, but there was no reply; only the quiet creaking of the boughs in the cold wind.