Read Online Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen - Free Book Online Page B

she ask what ended the school in the castle so suddenly, so silently and so totally.
    Several likely scandals Kenneth had kept at bay, but an unexpected one was the wrecker. “One cannot,” he sobbed to Constantine over the telephone, “think of everything!”
    “One had better be able to, next time,” replied his sponsor.
    “Such a stab-in-the-back!”
    “Nobody’s pinning anything on you, so far, are they?”
    “Not so far as one knows; but one never does, does one? Everything’s frightfully threatening. That filthy doctor—”
    “Listen: post Eva home—first thing.”
    “What’s poor Willy going to think of us?”
    “I’ll square Willy. Then get the others out, while the going’s good—it is still good, for a day or two?—Then you blow.”
    “Mayn’t that look rather fishy?”
    “This is fishy.”
    Eva, Willy considered, had had enough schooling for the time being. He took her to Mexico, where they were joined by Constantine; then, business calling him to the Far East, dropped her off with a Baptist missionary family in Hong Kong, reclaimed her, left her in San Francisco with some relations of his chiropodist’s, caused her to be flown to him in New York, flew her from thence to Hamburg, where he picked her up later and asked her if she would like to become a kennel-maid, decided it might be better for her to go to Paris and was about to arrange things on those lines when she said she would like to go to an English boarding-school: one for girls. Two years having elapsed, his daughter was on the eve of being sixteen.
    “What d’you want to do that for?” he asked, though absently.
    “I should like to learn.”
    “Why didn’t you think of that before?”
    “I did, Father.”
    “Then why didn’t you say so? You’re a bit old for that, now, I should have thought.”
    “I should like to.”
    “Then just as you like, dear girl,” sighed Willy, fondly and indeed more than that—with a sort of wistful, spectral imitation of the far more he would have liked to feel for her (and perhaps might have?). The best he seemed able to do for her was, begrudge her nothing. “I’ll find out. That’s to say, that shall be arranged.”
    So it was; in face of strong opposition. Willy had understood that girls’ schools would be looking about for girls, but far from it. They fought like wildcats to keep his girl out. Lumleigh was the first to weaken, so in he got her … Eva awoke one morning to find herself in a white, airy dormitory.
    This was a rainy, blowy, bright-green late spring. The girls wore their regulation oilskins, yellow, going from class to class, for much of the school went on in huts in the garden— enlightened huts, consisting so largely of glass that in them you still felt outdoors, in the gusts of petals from the new-planted cherry trees, cream, pink, crimson. Eva’s attention did not wander once a lesson began: steadily, earnestly, emphatically, and so searchingly as to appear reproachful, it remained focussed on whichever of the teachers held the floor. Some of them found it mesmeric. Miss Smith did not.
    Supremacy set apart this wonderful teacher. She could have taught anything. Her dark suit might have been the habit of an Order. Erect against a window of tossing branches she stood moveless, but for the occasional gesture of hand to forehead—then, the bringing of the fingertips to the brain seemed to complete an electric circuit. Throughout a lesson, her voice held a reined-in excitement—imparting knowledge, she conveyed its elatingness. The intellectual beauty of her sentences was informed by a glow; words she spoke sounded new-minted, unheard before. With her patient, sometimes ironic insistence upon fact, as fact, went what could be called her opposite capacity—that of releasing ideas, or speculation, into unbounded flight.
    Fearless of coming to an end, she allowed pauses, during which she thought, or picked up a book and turned over a page abstractedly, almost idly.