Cheerfulness Breaks In Read online

  Before Mr. Birkett whose dry sherry was rather well known could recover his balance, the door opened and his daughter Geraldine in her Red Cross uniform walked in and peeling off her gloves flicked them together in a very professional way.

  ‘Geraldine darling, I didn’t know you were coming home,’ said her mother. ‘This is Mr. Bissell, the Headmaster of the Hosiers’ Boys Foundation School.’

  ‘How do you do,’ said Geraldine. ‘Sorry, Mummy, if it’s a dinner party, but they’ve actually got a patient at the hospital, a flying man from Sparrowhill with jaundice, so Matron said some of us could have the week-end off, otherwise there’d be too many trying to nurse him.’

  Mrs. Birkett inquired if her daughter wanted a bath before dinner in which case she was sure Mr. Bissell would excuse them if they waited ten minutes. Mr. Bissell said, Pleased, he was sure, though no pleasure appeared to be in him, but Geraldine, again flicking her gloves in a swaggering way said she wouldn’t bother to change and anyway Mr. Bissell wasn’t changed either, so she would keep him company. Mr. Bissell would dearly have liked to explain that he had a dinner jacket suit and tails, both of which he was quite used to wearing in their proper place, with a rider on the Capittleist habit of changing for what he had learnt not to call tea but did not think it reasonable to call dinner, seeing that one dinner at midday should be enough for any man, but Simnet coming in with an air of triumph announced Captain Winter, and Philip appeared in uniform.

  For a few moments there was such a joyful crossfire of questions and answers that Mr. Bissell was quite forgotten. Philip explained that he had got an unexpected week-end’s leave and decided to run down to the School. He begged Kate to forgive him for not letting her know, but the telephone lines had been crowded out and a telegram would have arrived no sooner than he did.

  ‘It doesn’t matter in the least,’ said Kate, her soft eyes shining at the prospect of overhauling Philip’s uniform, and indeed every stitch on him during the week-end. ‘Your room is always ready for you and Bobbie will be so pleased to see you. He stood up to-day and pulled the table cloth so hard that two cups and saucers fell off and were broken,’ said Kate proudly.

  ‘He knew quite well what he had done,’ added Everard with equal pride.

  Everyone, except Mr. Bissell, knew that Master Carter could not possibly be pleased to see Philip, even if he was one of his godfathers, and would be far more likely to yell at the sight of a complete stranger in unknown clothes, but they were so fond of Everard and Kate that they allowed the subject to drop. Simnet announced dinner, Mrs. Birkett said she hoped cook would have found something for them all to eat, and they went into the dining-room.

  ‘I must tell you,’ said Kate, who was next to Mr. Bissell and in her kindness was afraid he might feel out of it, ‘that Bobbie is our little boy. He is just one and called after my brother Robert, at least his full name is Robert Philip, after Mr. Winter, whom I really ought to call Captain Winter now, but it all seems so unreal. How many children have you, Mr. Bissell?’

  Mr. Bissell, thawed by Kate’s obvious sincerity and interest, said it was a great grief to Mrs. Bissell and he that they had no chicks. Kate saw in Geraldine’s eye a professional nursing wish to ask him why, and knowing that no sentiment of what was suitable would keep her from her purpose, plunged into an interesting account of Bobbie’s first birthday and how he had been sick with excitement at the sight of his birthday cake, a plain sponge cake with one candle on it, but had subsequently recovered. During her soothing monologue Mr. Bissell began to feel at home and although he could not reconcile dinner jackets with his principles he enjoyed the good food and wine without knowing it and softened towards the representatives of Capittleism and an effete educational system more than he would have thought possible.

  It was not till Mrs. Morland unfortunately spoke of a book she had been reading about the Russian ballet that Mrs. Birkett had any cause for anxiety about her dinner party. Even as Philip Winter a few years ago had bristled at the name of Russia, so did Mr. Bissell now look defiantly about him, anxiously watching for his chance to become a martyr. Nor did he have long to wait, for Philip put forward the opinion that it was just as well we hadn’t had a trade pact with the Russians, as they would have turned round and bitten us. This was not to be borne.

  ‘Have you ever been to Russia?’ said Mr. Bissell, not quite sure if he ought to say Captain, but deciding against it as of a militarist tendency.

  ‘No,’ said Philip, and he and Everard began to laugh.

  Mrs. Birkett asked what the joke was.

  ‘It was when I was staying with you that summer at Northbridge,’ Philip answered her, ‘and the Oxbridge Press accepted my little book on Horace. I was going to Russia, but Everard said if the proofs were sent to me there they might be confiscated, so I went to Hungary with him and Noel Merton instead.’

  ‘You missed a most valuable opportunity,’ said Mr. Bissell. ‘It is practically unknown for letters to go astray in Russia.’

  Philip, baulking the main issue in a very cowardly way, said he hadn’t got the proofs till November, so it wouldn’t really have mattered.

  ‘Mark me,’ said Mr. Bissell.

  Everyone looked at him with interest.

  ‘Mark me,’ he said, ‘Russia is a Power to be reckoned with. Look what she has done for civilisation.’

  A confused hubbub rose about him in which the words Tchekov, Ballet, Rimsky, Diaghilev, Tschai-kovsky, Flying over the Pole were heard. Mr. Bissell, who meant something quite different, found it impossible to make himself heard.

  ‘It is more like Flying over the Poles now,’ said Mrs. Morland in her tragedy voice. ‘I never quite know how large Poland really is, because it seems to get bigger or smaller in history till one is quite giddy, but to have Russians there must be quite dreadful. Cossacks, only I don’t think they fly, and why the French are always allies of Poland I cannot think.’

  Mr. Bissell seizing upon a second’s silence said no one could begin to understand the World Problems of to-day who did not reckon with Stalin.

  ‘That’s what you used to say, Philip,’ said Geraldine accusingly.

  Philip said he used to say Lenin, but the principle was the same, only he found himself too busy ever to think of either of them when he was in camp.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Mrs. Morland, pushing her hair back, ‘they got it all from us.’

  ‘Got what, Laura?’ said Mr. Birkett.

  ‘You know perfectly well that you know what I am talking about and that I can never explain what I mean,’ said Mrs. Morland severely. ‘The Italians getting sympathy from us for the Risorgimento and look at them now, all Fascist and Abyssinian. And reading books in the British Museum, which is free, for weeks and months at our expense like Karl Marx. And the Russian ballet at Covent Garden charging the most frightful prices for everything, that we have to pay, though I must say it’s worth it, because when one goes to an English ballet one has to say how wonderful it is considering what a short time it has been going on.’

  Mr. Bissell felt himself reeling. Capable of close, sustained argument, with facts of all kinds at his finger tips, he was as baffled by Mrs. Morland’s mental flights as one of his own junior boys would have been by the differential calculus. How the Franco-Polish friendship, the Risorgimento, Karl Marx, and English ballet had sprung from Stalin he could not conceive. Either he was mad, or Mrs. Morland was mad, and a Public School Headmaster with his Senior Housemaster and his Senior Classical Master, now a Captain in the Army, not to speak of wives and daughters, were taking her irrelevant and illogical ramblings seriously, and therefore must be mad too. Exactly how much he longed for the bracing atmosphere of a debate at the Isle of Dogs Left Wing Athenæum no one but himself knew, but Mr. Birkett, Everard and Philip had a fairly good guess, and much as the Birketts loved Mrs. Morland even they found her swallow flights of thought a little confusing at times. Mrs. Birkett looked at her husband and rose with her ladies. As they left the room Geraldine w
ho had been silent, or as she preferred to imagine thinking things out, stopped near Mr. Bissell.

  ‘If you want to nationalise the hospitals I’m your man,’ she said, rather threateningly. ‘Of course the Government ought to pay for them and not us. We pay a jolly sight too much for things like hospitals and education that no one really wants. I’ve thought it all out and I’ll tell you what you ought to do— —’

  But Philip, who saw Mr. Bissell going mad before his eyes and was on very old-friendly terms with Geraldine, pushed her kindly out of the room and shut the door.

  ‘Have some port, Bissell,’ said Mr. Birkett. ‘No? I’m afraid Geraldine is a little overpowering. She can’t think of more than one thing at a time and just now it is hospitals. She is entirely uneducated and you must forgive her. She was never good at anything but mathematics. I got Carter here to-night so that we could have a good talk about the fitting in of our timetables and I am glad Winter has turned up, as he will be a great help. If you really don’t want any port, suppose we all adjourn to my study. And then tomorrow we’ll go over the school and I will show you exactly what we propose to do and you will doubtless have some suggestions to make.’

  Accordingly the four men went to the study where Simnet brought them coffee. Philip spoke of his month in camp and his chances of staying in England and being sent abroad, and posted himself up in school matters. While the three Southbridge masters talked Mr. Bissell reflected upon the extraordinary people among whom this war was going to force him to live. As far as he could see, though they were all very kind and obliging, not one of them had any clear idea about anything. Mr. Birkett and Mr. Carter, whom he must remember to call Birkett and Carter, were what was called educated men who had been to Oxford (though here he was wrong, for Everard was a Cambridge man) and Captain Winter, whom it would perhaps be all right to call Winter, had learnt Classics, a degree that one knew to be really difficult, though pure waste of time and getting you nowhere. Yet these men could sit and listen to conversation that the Isle of Dogs would not for a moment tolerate. When he and Mrs. Bissell went to tea with Mr. and Mrs. Lefroy of the Technical School, and Mr. Jobson from the Chemical Works and Mrs. Jobson, and Mr. Pecker from the Free Library and his unmarried daughter who taught music and folk dancing at the L.C.C. evening classes were there, then there was conversation. Mrs. Bissell, Mrs. Lefroy, Mrs. Jobson and Miss Pecker were in a woman’s proper place. At tea the talk would be general; Mr. Jobson would tell Mrs. Bissell about the indigo trade, Mr. Lefroy would tell Mrs. Jobson about the new wood-carving class and what Miss Makins of the art weaving class had said, Mr. Pecker would give Mrs. Lefroy information about the Borough Council’s stinginess in the matter of gum for the labels, while he himself would explain to Miss Pecker the latest developments in his feud with the officials responsible for University grants, after which the men would retire to Mr. Lefroy’s den, so-called apparently because it was the back room in the basement and had bars at the window, though to keep burglars out rather than Mr. Lefroy and his friends in, and discuss the coming Social Revolution and Russia’s part in it, with well chosen reasoning (mostly chosen from sixpenny books of a Red and tendentious nature) and almost complete unanimity of view. After this they would go early on account of Monday morning, spiritually much refreshed.

  How Mrs. Morland, who wrote books that Mr. Pecker often handed out at the Free Library and therefore must be intellectual, could be allowed to talk as she did, with no visible chain of thought and a total want of depth and earnestness, he could not imagine. And Miss Birkett, though she might be good at mathematics, seemed to have no knowledge of economics whatever. Mrs. Birkett and Mrs. Carter were certainly nice, but in any revolution they would obviously be the first to go. Still, he had made up his mind when this war began in which Russia, betrayed by England, had so far forgotten herself as to make a pact with the Ryke, that though he could not conscientiously approve of anything here or elsewhere, his duty to his profession was to meet everything as coolly as he could, carry out orders, look after his boys and masters, keep Mrs. Bissell’s spirits up and never grumble at anything. So he put the disquieting behaviour of his hostess and her friends away in his mind for future reflection and prepared himself for discussion.

  Mr. Birkett and Everard, when the subject of sending London schools to the country had first been raised, had secretly hoped to get one of the London public schools, but pressure had been put on them to take in the Hosiers’ Boys Foundation School, and thinking with their guest that their obvious duty was to do what came to their hand, had during the preceding spring a good deal of correspondence with Mr. Bissell, so that they knew pretty well the numbers and requirements of the school, luckily not a very large one. As a larger number of boys were leaving than usual they were able to clear one of the boarding-houses for a number of the Hosiers’ Boys. The rest were to be put in a large empty house owned by the Governors which had been fitted up as a boarding-house, largely by Kate’s energy and common sense in all domestic matters. The Hosiers’ Boys would have their classes partly in the School itself, partly in some wooden huts that Mr. Birkett’s foresight had collected before the rush began. It might be possible to pool some of the junior classes, but the whole arrangement still needed a good deal of consideration. However two hours’ solid work did a great deal and then Mr. Birkett said they would all go to bed.

  ‘By the way, Bissell,’ he said as they went into the hall, ‘what about you and your wife? Will you live with your staff in the boarding-house? We haven’t considered that.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of it either,’ said Mr. Bissell. ‘Mrs. Bissell would be quite agreeable I’m sure. She isn’t one for thinking of herself. Of course she isn’t used to sharing, but we talked it over, her and I, and I’m sure she feels like I do.’

  Mr. Bissell looked so tired as he made this noble but not very helpful statement that Everard felt sorry for him. To have to move a hundred boys or so into new surroundings, to make yourself responsible for them as boarders when most of them were day boys, to have to share school accommodation with unknown and possibly hostile strangers, to leave your own home, it was all quite difficult enough, without having to eat and live with your staff and forty boys. On an impulse he said:

  ‘I don’t know how the idea would suit you, Bissell, but if you and your wife cared to come to us for a bit and see how you like it, we would be delighted. Ask her and let me know.’

  Mr. Bissell said he daresaid Mrs. Bissell wouldn’t mind, and Everard understood him. Simnet came forward with the news that Mrs. Carter had gone home some time ago, so Everard and Philip said good night and walked across the School Quad, in silence. Kate was still up when they came in and while they had drinks she asked how everything had gone. Everard said very well, and next morning they were to go over the boarding-house reserved for the Hosiers’ Boys and settle about some of the classrooms.

  ‘I asked Bissell and his wife to come to us for a bit, Kate,’ said Everard. ‘It doesn’t seem quite fair for them to have to live with their masters and boys. They couldn’t even have a sitting-room of their own. Is that all right?’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Kate, her eyes assuming the faraway expression which always meant very sensible thoughts about practical things and which Everard still thought the most enchanting sight in the world. For had not she looked with just such eyes at a loose button on his waistcoat when he had first met her. ‘Quite right. If I give them the spare room I could turn the dressing-room into a sitting-room and let them use the other bathroom. The only thing is that Philip would have to share the bathroom with them when he comes back on leave, or else use the prefects’ bathroom. Would you mind, Philip?’

  Philip said of course he wouldn’t and Everard and Kate were angels and personally he would far rather be in a draught-ridden hut on Sparrowhill than shut up with Mr. Bissell and the unknown Mrs. Bissell.

  ‘Well it won’t be for ever,’ said the practical Kate, ‘and I was so sorry for Mr. Bissell when he said they had
n’t got any children. Would you like to see Bobbie asleep before you go to bed, Philip?’

  Mr. Birkett and Mr. Bissell looked into the drawing-room to say good night. Much to Mr. Bissell’s relief Geraldine had gone to bed and as the two other ladies were very sleepy good nights were said at once.

  ‘Did you have a good evening?’ said Mrs. Birkett when she and her husband were alone together.

  ‘Quite good. We got a lot of work done and can finish the practical details to-morrow. Laura was very Lauraish to-night.’

  ‘She was tired,’ said Mrs. Birkett. ‘She didn’t enjoy having to rush home from France with Tony when things began to look bad, and the elder boys will probably be in the army, except John who is the sailor, and she doesn’t know if anyone will be buying books now. I’m very glad we’ve got her here.’

  ‘Bissell doesn’t realise the intelligence of what he must look on as uneducated women,’ said Mr. Birkett, ‘and I thought he would go mad at the dinner table. I suppose Geraldine simply must bore people about the hospital. Well, thank goodness Rose is out of it.’

  So they went to bed. And Mr. Bissell in the second-best spare room wondered at the peculiar surroundings in which his lot had been cast and saw but little hope for the future if the so-called educated classes were so hopelessly ignorant and shallow. Birkett, it is true, would be a good man to work with and Mrs. Carter was very sympathetic, and after all the boys were the chief thing to be considered. So, with less distrust than he had felt on his arrival and great thankfulness that Miss Birkett would mostly be at the Hospital, he too went to sleep.