§ 2
After she had fought her way to the sixth form in the Taverners’ School the educational outlook of Christina Alberta was troubled by dissensions both within the school and without. The staff was divided about her, her discipline was bad, her class-work rank or vile, but she passed examinations, and particularly external examinations by independent examiners, with conspicuous success. There was a general desire to get her out of the school; but whether that was to be done by a university scholarship or a simple request to her parents to take her away, was a question under dispute. The games-mistress was inclined to regard murder as a third possible course because of the girl’s utter disregard for style in games, her unsportsmanlike trick of winning them in irregular and unexpected ways, and her tendency to make drill and gymnastics an occasion for a low facetiousness far more suitable for the ordinary class-room. The English and Literature mistress concurred—although Christina Alberta would spend hours over her essays working in sentences and paragraphs from Pater and Ruskin and Hazlitt so that they might pass as her own original constructions. It was not Christina Alberta’s fault if ever and again these threads of literary gold were marked in red ink, “Clumsy” or “Might be better expressed” or “Too flowery.” Only the head-mistress had a really good word for Christina Alberta. But then the head-mistress, as became her position, made a specialty of understanding difficult cases.
And Christina Alberta was always quietly respectful to the head-mistress, and could produce a better side to her nature with the most disconcerting alacrity whenever the head-mistress was called in.
Christina Alberta, as soon as the issue became clear to her, decided for the scholarship. She reformed almost obtrusively, she became tidy, she ceased to be humorous, she lost sets of tennis to the games-mistress like a little sports-woman, and she stopped arguing and became the sedulous ape of Stevenson for the estranged English mistress. But it was up-hill work even in the school. There was a little too much elegant surrender in her reformed tennis and a little too much parody about her English in velveteen. The possibility that she would ever join that happy class of girls who go in from the suburbs to classes in London and lead the higher life beyond parental inspection and sometimes until quite late in the evening in studios, laboratories and college lecture-rooms, seemed a very insecure one, even without reckoning with the quiet but determined opposition of her mother.
For Mrs. Preemby was not the woman to like a daughter educated above her parentage and station. She came to lament her weakness in not bringing Christina Alberta into the laundry as she herself had been brought in at the age of fourteen. Then she would have learnt the business from the ground up, and have qualified herself to help and at last succeed her mother, even as Mrs. Preemby had helped and succeeded Mrs. Hossett. But the school with its tennis and music and French and so forth had turned the girl against this clean and cleansing life. She was rising seventeen now, and the sooner she abandoned these things which lead straight to school-teaching, spinsterhood, Italian holidays, “art” clothes and stuck-up incapacity, the better for her and every one.
She made a campaign against Christina Alberta’s habit of sitting about in unladylike attitudes and reading; and when Mr. Preemby took the unusual and daring course of saying that it was a bit hard on the girl, and that he didn’t see any harm in a book or so now and then, Mrs. Preemby took him up to Christina Alberta’s own little room to see what came of it, and more particularly to see the sort of pictures she’d stuck up there. Even when he was confronted with a large photographic reproduction of Michael Angelo’s creation of Adam as the master had painted that event on the roof of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, he still made a feeble show of resistance, and said that it was “Art.”
“You’d stand anything she did, I believe,” said Mrs. Preemby. “Look at it. Art! Look at these books! Darwin’s Origin of Species! That’s a nice book for a girl to be prying into.”
“Very likely she doesn’t see the harm of it,” said Mr. Preemby.
“Her!” said Mrs. Preemby compactly. “And look at this!”
“This” was Howe’s Atlas of Biology. She opened it to display its large pages crowded with pictures of the detailed dissection of a frog.
“Reely, my dear!” said Mr. Preemby. “It’s one of her schoolbooks. There reely isn’t nothing what I should call improper in that. It’s Science. And, after all, it’s only a frog.”
“Pretty things they teach at school nowadays. What with your Art and your Science. Doesn’t leave much to the imagination. Why, when I was a girl if I’d asked Ma what was inside any animal, she’d have slapped me and slapped me hard. And rightly. There’s things rightly hid from us—and hid they ought to be. God shows us as much as is good for us. More. No need to open animals. And here—here’s a book in French!”
“H’m,” said Mr. Preemby, yielding a little. He took up the lemon-yellow volume and turned it over in his hand.
“All this reading!” said Mrs. Preemby and indicated three shelves of books.
Mr. Preemby assembled his courage. “You mustn’t expect me to go against reading, Chris,” he said. “It’s a pleasure and a light. There’s things in books.... Reely, Chris, I believe you’d be happier if you read a bit. Christina Alberta is a born reader, whether you like it or not. She gets it from me, I suppose.”
Mrs. Preemby started and regarded his flushed opposition; the anger in her eyes was magnified through her glasses. “It’s wonderful,” she said after a little pause; “it’s truly wonderful how Christina Alberta manages to get everything she wants.”