The Beth Book Part 57

"You'll have to hurry more than you can, then, in cla.s.s," Miss Bey remarked, "if this is your ordinary rate of work."

When the sums were done, she took the slate and glanced over them.

"They are every one wrong," she said; "but I see you know how to work them. Now clean the slate, and do some dictation."

She took up a book when Beth was ready, and began to read aloud from it. Beth became so interested in the subject that she forgot the dictation, and burst out at last, "Well, I never knew that before."

"You are doing dictation now," Miss Bey observed severely.

"All right, go on," Beth cheerfully rejoined.

Miss Bey did not go on, however, and on looking up to see what was the matter, Beth found her gazing at her with bent brows.

"May I ask what your name is?" Miss Bey inquired.

"Beth Caldwell."

"Then allow me to inform you, Miss Beth Caldwell, that 'all right, go on,' is not the proper way to address the head-mistress of the Royal Service School for Officers' Daughters."

"Thank you for telling me," Beth answered. "You see I don't know these things. I always say that to mamma."

"Have you ever been to school before?" Miss Bey asked.

"No," Beth answered.

"Oh!" Miss Bey e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, with peculiar meaning. "Then you will have a great deal to learn."

"I suppose so," Beth rejoined. "But that's what I came for, you know--to learn. It's high time I began!"

She fixed her big eyes on the blank wall opposite, and there was a sorrowful expression in them. Miss Bey noted the expression, and nodded her head several times, but there was no relaxation of her peremptory manner when she spoke again.

"Go on, my dear," she said. "If I give as much time to the others as you are taking, I shall not get through the new girls to-night."

Beth finished her dictation.

"What a hand!" Miss Bey exclaimed. "Wherever did you learn to write like that?"

"I taught myself to write small on purpose," Beth replied. "You can get so much more on to the paper."

"You had better have taught yourself to spell, then," Miss Bey rejoined. "There are four mistakes in this one pa.s.sage."

Beth balanced her pencil on her finger with an air of indifference.

She was wondering how it was that the head-mistress of the Royal Service School for Officers' Daughters used the word "wherever" as the vulgar do.

The examination concluded with some questions in history and geography, which Beth answered more or less incorrectly.

"I shall put you here in the sixth," Miss Bey informed her; "but rather for your size than for your acquirements. There is a delicate girl, much smaller than you are, in the first."

"Then I'd rather be myself, tall and strong, in the sixth," Beth rejoined. "If I don't catch her up, at all events I shall have more pleasure in life, and that's something."

Again Miss Bey gazed at her; but she was too much taken aback by Beth's readiness to correct her on the instant, although it was an unaccustomed and a monstrous thing for a girl to address a mistress in an easy conversational way, let alone differ from her.

She took Beth to the great cla.s.s-room where the seventh and eighth worked, and the fifth and sixth joined them for recreation and preparation, and where also the Bible lessons were given by Miss Clifford to the whole school.

There were a good many girls of various ages in the room, who all looked up.

"This is a new girl," Miss Bey said, addressing them generally,--"Miss Beth Caldwell. Please to show her where to go and what to do."

She glanced round keenly as she spoke, then left the room; and at the same time a thin, sharp-looking little girl with short hair rose from the table at which she was sitting and went up to Beth.

"I'm head of the fifth," she said. "Has Bey been examining you? What cla.s.s did she put you in?"

"The sixth," Beth said.

"I should have thought you'd have been in the third at least," the head of the fifth piped, "you're so big. Here are some sixth girls--Jessie Baker, Ina Formby, Rosa Bird."

The sixth girls were sitting at a round table, with their little desks before them, writing letters. One of them pulled out a chair for Beth.

They had just returned from the holidays, and were in various stages of home-sickness--some of them crying, and the rest depressed; but they welcomed Beth kindly, as one of themselves, and inspected her with interest.

"You can write a private letter to-day, you know," Rosa Bird said to Beth.

"What is a private letter?" Beth asked.

"One to your mother, you know, that isn't read. You seal it up yourself. Public letters have to be sent in open to Miss Clifford. One week you write a public letter, and the next a private one. h.e.l.lo!

here's Amy Wynne!"

A dark girl of about eighteen had entered by a door at the farther end of the room, and was received with acclamation, being evidently popular. Beth, who was still in her mask of calm indifference, looked coldly on, but in herself she determined to be received like that some day.

Most of the girls in the room jumped up, and Amy Wynne kissed one after the other, and then shook hands with Beth.

"Are all my children back?" she asked.

"I don't know," Rosa Bird rejoined, glancing round. "They are not all here."

"That's one of the mothers," Rosa explained to Beth when Amy Wynne had gone again. "The first-cla.s.s girls are mothers to us. You walk with your mother in the garden, and sit with her on half-holidays, and she's awfully good to you. I advise you to be one of Amy Wynne's children if you can." She was interrupted by the loud ringing of a bell in the hall. "That's for tea," Rosa added. "Come, and I'll show you the way."

The big dining-room was downstairs in the bas.e.m.e.nt, next the kitchen.

Miss Clifford dined in the next room attended by her maids of honour (the two girls at the top of the first cla.s.s for the time being) and the rest of the cla.s.s except the girls at the bottom, who were degraded to the second-cla.s.s table in the big dining-room. Here each two cla.s.ses had a separate table, at either end of which a teacher sat on a Windsor chair. The girls had nothing but hard benches without backs to sit on. Miss Bey, the housekeeper Miss Winch, and the head music-mistress, irreverently called Old Tom by the girls, sat at a separate table, where, at dinner-time, they did all the carving, and s.n.a.t.c.hed what little dinner they could get in the intervals, patiently and foolishly regardless of their own digestions. For tea there were great dishes of thick bread and b.u.t.ter on all the tables, which the girls began to hand round as soon as grace had been said. Each cla.s.s had a big basin of brown sugar to put in the tea, which gave it a coa.r.s.e flavour. The first cup was not so bad, but the second was nothing but hot water poured through the teapot. It was not etiquette to take more than two. When the girls were ready for a second, they put pieces of bread in their saucers that they might know their own again, and pa.s.sed the cups up to the teacher who poured out tea. If any girl suspected that the cup returned to her was not her own, she would not touch the tea. When the meal was over, one of the girls took the sugar-basin, beat down the sugar in it flat and hard with the spoon, did a design on the top, and put it away.

"What's that for?" Beth asked.

"That's so that we shall know our own again," Rosa answered. "But it never lasts the proper time."

"What do you do when it's done?" said Beth.

"Do without," was the laconic rejoinder.

All the girls were talking at once.