The Doll Maker

3

Miss Sperrod came back from London the day after Boxing Day. The first news of her arrival that Clare had was in the evening, when the maid brought her a message to say that the Principal wished to see her in her sitting−room. Clare left the Prefects' Room and went slowly through to the front of the school.

She had spent the two days of Christmas in a mood of strange quietude and content: a mood out of all harmony with what she should have felt. By the experience of the Christmas before, the brittle pretence of jollity, which the Matron and Miss Finch tried to sustain for the benefit of the few miserable juniors immured with them, should have left Clare depressed and irritated. Boxing Day should have ended in a congested gloom of indigestion and ill−temper. On the contrary, when she put her head on the pillow that night, Clare felt nothing but a wide peace. It endured beyond next morning's awakening, and all morning, tramping through the hoar−frosted grounds and sitting by the little fire in the Prefects' Room, Clare mused over a hitherto unknown feeling: unknown, as far as all positive memory went; but somewhere in the lost dawn of recollection there was a fugitive knowledge of some such sensation of security and mellow peace experienced long ago in the different world of early childhood.

It should not have been so: that was the puzzle. There should have been very different feelings associated with the images of Brackenbine and its inhabitants that stood so vividly and constantly in these two days before her mind's eye. The peace and friendliness were there, it is true, and Clare had brought away the cosy warmth of the Sternes' hearth in her heart, but, starting like sharp thorns out of that sweetness, there had been other things to startle and distress her.

That sudden confrontation with Anne Otterel's portrait and the revelation of her intimacy with the Sternes should have surprised her far more than it did. She ought to have felt grieved and jealous: hurt that Anne had had friendships that she had kept hidden from her. Clare knew she would have felt so if the revelation had come a little earlier, in another way. But now there was this new tolerance and understanding, this peace in her heart. She could see herself, without any sense of perverse self−denigration at all, just as Anne must have seen her: one among a number of schoolgirls whom Anne had to do with in term−time, no one very important to Anne in her own free life. Anne would have shaken off Paston Hall from her soul as soon as she stepped outside the gate on the last day of term. Clare knew exactly now what that feeling of emancipation was, for by going to Brackenbine she herself had discarded Paston Hall. School had burst open as when a ripening kernel splits the nut, and the shrivelled husk had fallen from her.

The Sternes, in truth, were grown−up people, and they had accepted her on equal terms. They were so much more alive, so much more people of the real world than anyone at Paston Hall, and they had suddenly lifted her out of this paper−thin school world of dull pretence into the rich, full world to which she ought to belong: that was the dominant feeling in Clare's heart, and that was, she knew, the source of her great happiness. They had delivered her from bondage. Niall had made amends for the sin of his slave−dealing ancestor.

Her suspicion that it was he who had caused his mother to send the invitation had grown, over Christmas, into a certainty, and the certainty made her smile tenderly. Mrs. Sterne had sent Christmas cards to all the Staff on Christmas morning. There was one for Clare, a plain, engraved card of greetings, but slipped in the envelope with it was another hurriedly made out of a folded square of paper. It bore a picture consisting chiefly of a patch of Indian ink with a few sketchy light lines to indicate the trunks of trees—the pitchy blackness of Brackenbine wood—and in the blackness four or five tiny points of light, like cats' eyes shining from the thicket; but she knew them for the little lights she had seen from the wall−top.

That little mystery excited her curiosity more than all the other new and stimulating things she had discovered at the Sternes'. She had longed to ask Niall on Christmas Eve what he was doing with his little lights in the wood, but had just lacked the assurance to frame the question. His teasing card seemed an invitation to her to ask it now. It would be something, she guessed, as unexpected and as oddly interesting as Niall's hobby of making puppets, or the old Captain's cultivation of dwarf trees. Clare was overcome with longing to be as free as Niall and his mother to do interesting things, to follow her own bent and find and exercise her own gifts. Before tea−time on that third day of Christmas a strong plant of resolution had taken root in her longing: just before it was too late, the possibility of winning the scholarship to Oxford had been demonstrated to her again. Busily and happily, she got out her notebooks and fell to planning an intensive course of revision and new study for the remaining weeks to Easter.

She left them with some reluctance when she received the Principal's summons. Miss Sperrod had never seemed so unnecessary a hindrance as now. She found Miss Geary with the Principal and was as surprised by the old lady's somewhat guilty and embarrassed look as by the sugariness of Miss Sperrod's reception of her. As usual, it took Clare some time to discern Miss Sperrod's purpose through the babble of all−but−meaningless preliminaries which she customarily put out, as if to hold off attack while she consolidated her own position. Clare saw, from the many glances she darted at Miss Geary during this preface, that she was not quite sure how her proposition was going to be received, but the proposition itself, when at length it was clearly stated, was the last one she would ever have expected the Principal to make.

It was, simply, that Mrs. Sterne, having learnt from Miss Geary that Clare was having difficulty through lack of coaching with her Latin, had suggested that she herself might give her a few private lessons each week until the scholarship examination.

While this communication was being made to Clare, Miss Geary looked steadily at the ceiling. Clare, dumbfounded, said nothing, and Miss Sperrod, interpreting that as unwillingness, outdid all previous exhibitions of vehemence and volubility that Clare had ever witnessed. It gave Clare time, however, to realise the astounding persistence of the vein of good fortune she had stumbled on; she would not for the world have disclosed to Miss Sperrod how much the offer meant to her, but she stammered some words of thanks that seemed too drastically controlled to carry any conviction, and asked when would Mrs. Sterne expect her to begin.

“I am sending a note to Mrs. Sterne,” said the Principal. “I'm replying straight away. It would be proper if you wrote a little note yourself to thank her. The lessons will have to be fitted into your time−table, of course, but you must try by all means to suit Mrs. Sterne's convenience. It will be a very great advantage to you. Mrs. Sterne is really highly qualified in the classics. Her father was quite a well−known professor. I am explaining that very carefully to your Father.”

To Clare nothing mattered much but that she should learn how soon she was expected to go to Brackenbine, and until she had found that out clearly from Miss Geary, she could not believe that she was not dreaming these arrangements. Then, when it was established that she might go off to Brackenbine any time that suited her to fix convenient hours with Mrs. Sterne, there was a preposterous confabulation about who was to take her. Miss Sperrod took instant alarm at the notion of one of her charges walking the public highway by herself; Clare had to listen to the discussion of half a dozen absurd schemes for chaperoning her, until her exasperation was such that it was on the tip of her tongue to tell the Principal tartly that she had no need at all to venture into the public road to get to Brackenbine. She remarked somewhat petulantly to Miss Geary, after they left the Principal's sitting−room, that girls younger than herself cycled alone from villages miles away to Pentabridge High School daily along that very road in term−time without anybody suggesting that they needed escorting. Miss Geary only answered gently that she did not see that what High−School girls did was really relevant. She undertook, all the same, to find a way over the difficulty.

In all the discussion between them, neither Miss Geary nor Clare mentioned Niall's presence at Brackenbine. There was no conspiracy between them to suppress the fact, but Clare was certain that Miss Sperrod did not know he was at home. She was by no means so naive as to suppose that Miss Sperrod would have found the same enthusiasm for the project if she had known that the young man was there. She took the old lady's tacit assumption that Niall's presence was no bar to her going to Brackenbine as evidence of a good breeding which nothing she knew of Miss Sperrod justified her in supposing the Principal possessed. At the same time, although she was grateful for Miss Geary's silent compliment to her own good taste and sense, she would have liked her to mention Niall; she would have liked to hear whether he had been there last summer when Miss Geary went to Brackenbine; she would have liked to know how much she knew and how much the Principal knew about Anne Otterel's visits there in the summer holidays. But Miss Geary did not enlighten her on any of this.

The old lady, however, managed the business of escorting her quite simply, by packing her off by herself soon after luncheon on the following day and saying she would meet her at Brackenbine lodge−gates to accompany her back at half−past three. They would thus be at the school again before it was dark. Clare made no question of the wisdom or convenience of the arrangement, but fled along the quiet, empty road to the old iron gates of Brackenbine as light of heart and foot as a hare set free from the net.

In the fine, crisp days of the week following Christmas the arrangement worked very well. Clare would arrive with her grammar and exercise book at Brackenbine soon after luncheon, to find Mrs. Sterne waiting for her with a good log fire burning in the little dining−parlour and books spread on the oak table. For two hours they would work at Latin. It was teaching of a sort Clare had never known before. Even Anne Otterel, in the very short time she had given to Clare the previous summer term, had had something of the schoolmistress in her manner; but to enter on Latin grammar with Mrs. Sterne was like setting out with a companion to explore a newfound land: neither knowing on what wonders and riches they might chance at any moment. Clare began to see that Mrs. Sterne had learnt her Latin as a child for the pleasure of its literature; it had never been a dead language to her. She told Clare how she and her father used to talk a kind of dog−latin together, she making up words where she did not know them, her father gravely accepting them so long as they were correctly inflected. Mrs. Sterne was able to show Clare the relation of Latin to French and Spanish, which no one had ever pointed out to her before; to reveal the descent of little Spanish ditties Clare knew, from songs and rhymes heard in the streets of Rome two thousand years ago. She read passages of the Aeneid and the Georgics aloud, and suddenly that spiky fence of scansion and syntax which had previously seemed to Clare to prevent her ever feeling the power and meaning of Latin verse collapsed; the language came to life. These words upon the page had been spoken by living lips that lovingly shaped the beauty of their sounds, and they had been heard by living people who were moved by them as she was moved by a poem of Yeats.

Clare drank in huge draughts of new understanding, and in doing so acquired a voracious appetite for factual knowledge. She saw the acquisition of grammatical knowledge as a necessary preparation for their delightful expeditions of exploration, and she set about acquiring it with the same excited zest as she had given in childhood to preparing the equipment for a picnic or camping trip with her father. Endowed with an excellent memory and with a gift for concentration where her interest was roused, she mastered each morning substantial portions of grammar, and, in being so busy and in the feeling of making a real gain of knowledge, the listlessness and despair of the autumn term slipped from her. The assurance and shining content that had begun on Christmas Eve persisted.

Each day their lesson would be ended at three o'clock by the cheerful rattle of cups as Niall brought in to them an early cup of tea. It was a sound that Clare came to listen for as putting the crown on her delight. Then, for a few minutes the three of them would sit before the glowing logs and talk—of Latin and of poetry, of pictures and foreign lands, of everything under the sun, or, as it seemed to Clare, of every sunlit thing.

Usually Niall would walk back with her to the lodge−gates, through the grave brown oak−woods, and then he would be at his gayest and most extravagant, telling her tales of his Great−Uncle Jabez that set them both laughing until their voices rang back in echo from the hard−frozen slopes of Akenshaw Hill. It was Niall who explained, or rather hinted at an explanation of Miss Sperrod's concern to maintain good relations with the owner of Brackenbine.

“Old Jabez couldn't keep the Hall up,” he said. “It wants an army of servants and even in his day that came expensive. He'd run through the Sterne fortune soon after his father left it to him and got into pretty low water. He couldn't sell the estate, of course; it's entailed upon the heirs male. Then Arthur Sperrod—your Principal's brother—popped up and made himself useful, and, I suspect the consideration was that Jabez withdrew to Brackenbine and let the Hall to your respected Governing Body for a song. We renewed the lease on the same terms soon after I inherited the property. Actually, though I'm your landlord, Arthur Sperrod has the management of the whole thing. All he needs is my signature when the lease falls to be renewed again the year after next. It's an advantageous arrangement to your Governors. They wouldn't find such another place for so little now in the length of England.”

“But you're not forced to renew it, if you could get more for it from somebody else, are you?” Clare asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Oh well. It suits us well enough. We're bad business people. All we want is to be quiet and private. We might get much worse neighbours than you, you know. We are not unappreciative of Spoil−the−Child's careful discipline!” He grinned.

Clare had never worked so hard in all her schooldays, and yet her activity now seemed as different from pre−examination 'swotting' as old holidays had seemed from term−time. The 'few lessons a week' that Mrs. Sterne had suggested were, from the beginning, one a day. Quickly Clare came to feel that Brackenbine rather than Paston Hall was her home; she felt at home there as soon as she passed the iron gates.

One afternoon when the New Year was a few days old she came as usual to Brackenbine, but on stepping from the little hall into the dining−parlour she found it empty. The fire burned on the hearth but no books were spread on the table. She peeped into the drawing−room, where the great Christmas−tree still stood and the evergreens still ornamented the chimney−breast; that too, was empty. She opened the door to the kitchen and listened, but no sound came from there. Then she caught the slight noise of someone moving upstairs, and, rather diffidently, called Mrs. Sterne's name from the foot of the stairs. An indinstinct reply came down to her. A little hesitantly she climbed halfway up. There she heard Niall's voice clearly raised: “Hello! Here I am!”

She went up to the top landing, and through an open door saw Niall busy with a suitcase on his bed, and drawers and cupboard doors opened round him.

“Hello!” he exclaimed as he looked up. “I thought it was my mother. Isn't she back yet?”

He came out on to the landing where Clare stood in the light from the open studio door. “She went to Pentabridge this morning,” he explained. “I thought she'd be back before you came.”

“No,” said Clare. “No, she's not downstairs. I—I thought it was your mother calling—I came up...” “Well,” he said, after a pause during which he looked away from her, back into his bedroom, “she can't be

long; she was going to get the one o'clock bus and she's only got to walk from Halliwell corner.” Clare had followed his gaze to the suitcase open on his bed and the things scattered round it.

“I'll just wait in the dining−room,” she said. “You want to get on with your packing, I expect.” She spoke in a flat voice, not looking at him.

“Oh well...” he said. “No hurry about that.”

He moved away to the threshold of the studio and stood looking idly round at the litter of things within. He was silent so long that Clare, troubled by the strange flatness and coldness that had fallen between them, forced herself to say something:

“Are you going away for long?”

He moved over to his work−bench on the other side of the studio, and she had perforce to follow him to hear his reply. He stood looking down at his tools as if studying what he should do with them, and only after a long pause replied:

“I don't know. I don't know how long it will be.”

There was a gloomy finality in his tone, and Clare did not know what to say after that. She felt her own heart sink like a stone and, standing there, a little behind him, watching his long fingers as they played with the handle of a chisel on the bench, she admitted quite simply and humbly to herself that the greater part of the fife and joy and zest of her days would depart with Niall.

She looked round the studio, from the fire still smouldering on the hearth to the curtained window at the far end. It seemed exactly the same as when she had seen it on Christmas Eve, except that the portrait which had leaned against the foot of the easel had gone. It was nowhere to be seen in the room.

Abruptly Niall turned and looked down on her with a most serious, searching gaze. His dark eyes were so intent and there was such stern concentration in his face that she shrank back a little, startled and puzzled, thinking that he was angry. But he turned his head away after a moment and smiled somewhat sadly and awkwardly.

“I've just remembered,” he said. “I promised to show you something. I'd better redeem my promise before I go.”

“The puppets?” she asked, relieved beyond all proper measure that he was not angry.

“No, no,” he said, “or, at least, not exactly. No, it's nothing of mine. You remember I told you about old Captain Trethewy's hobby? The little tree's? Well, here they are.”

He walked to the far end of the room and drew the heavy curtain aside, revealing a small window with leaded panes and a deep, low wooden window−seat below it.

He knelt on the window−seat and made a gesture to Clare to sit beside him. She did so and gave a little exclamation of surprise and pleasure as she looked out.

The sill of the window, on a level with her chin inside, was only a few inches above the ground outside. She was looking into a deep hollow of the hill, as it were an old quarry, closed on three sides by sheer walls of sandstone rock and on the fourth by the gable−end of the house. Grass and little bushes grew thickly in all the clefts and crannies of the rock walls, and the trees of the wood stood thickly all round their upper edge; while the floor of the enclosed space, which might have been a little bigger than a tennis−court, was thickly carpeted with moss. It was not a level floor: it sloped gently up towards the back and sides of the hollow, and was varied by little undulations and tiny knolls where knobs of grey stone peeped out from under the mantling moss; here and there glinted the pale surface of a little frozen pool. About all this space, planted in groves and in alleys and singly, were the Captain's trees. None was more than three feet high, yet each was a perfect tree of some evergreen species unknown to Clare. Cupping her hands beside her face to shut out the room and the normal−sized trees of the wood above, she could look out into this miniature park as if she were viewing a distant landscape, and then the little trees seemed like ancient oaks, as mighty and venerable as those of Akenshaw, stout−boled, spreading their crooked arms wide over a dark green sward.

There were miniature walks meandering among the groves and through the alleys, and level stretches of what seemed like open lawn where she could fancy a herd of deer or red cattle might graze. Her eye travelled slowly over the landscape back to where the trees stood more thickly on the gently rising ground beneath the steep wall of rock, and there it fell upon what seemed at first sight a rough pile of crags rising above the foliage, but which, as she stared, in the subdued grey light that fell into that hollow place, she thought to be rather an artificial construction, not so much a miniature mountain as some rough, irregular pile of buildings, a castle of wild, fantastic style built of brown sandstone. The little walks converged up the slope towards it, but the entrance to it was hidden by the gnarled trees standing in a thick belt before it. Niall gave a short sigh, and she turned to him.

“And did the Captain make all this—this little park and all? And it's been kept so carefully all these years?”

“Carefully?” he answered. “No, hardly that. The trees could not help but live. But the Captain's garden suffered a long neglect under the Sternes. It's I who've tidied it up. And I who've played the Vandal, too.”

With his fingertip on the panes he drew her attention to a number of stumps about the miniature park where trees had been cut. She exclaimed in distress, “Oh! Why did you cut them?”

“Never fear,” he said. “The Captain's theory was right. The roots are immortal. Do you not see the little shoots springing from the old stump, here, from this near one? Look! I have only helped myself to the timber, and I've done that sparingly like a good and careful estate−manager. I don't think the Captain would grudge me the use of the timber he planted, for nothing else would do, and the purpose I have is something in his own vein.”

“Why? What have you used it for?” Clare asked.

He rose and drew the curtain again as Clare also got up.

They heard someone moving about briskly below now, and a moment later Mrs. Sterne's voice called up to them.

“Here we are!” Niall called back.

He stood a moment and looked at Clare, smiling. “I told you I was following fallacies of duration, seeking to make things that would live for ever, even like the Captain. The wood of his undying trees is the stuff I make my puppets from.”