Here was as painful a decease as any that anybody could ask for, entailing pangs to purse and pride alike. For it meant she must undergo an odious dissolution behind the gauze blind in the dingy office of the Daneborough Mercury, and suffer the agony and shame of having her announcement read aloud, to herself and two attendant advertisers, in the clerk’s unmodulated voice, as if it were a police charge against her. The clerk, an adolescent who had apparently overgrown his strength for deciphering script, stumbled heavily over Mrs. Holmroyd’s handwriting, asking “Patient and What? Patient and Scientific?” She corrected him with a flushed face,--“Patient and conscientious ...” loathing herself and the word that drew such odious notoriety on them both. “Oh, Conscientious, is it!” decided the clerk, whose critical faculty thus enlightened showed a contestant disposition. “It looks more like scientific to me.” And, indeed, saying “Stop a minute. Let’s make that plain,”--went over the prospective schoolmistress’ imperfect handwriting with a pencil. That done, he concluded his recital of the charge, devoid of mercy or of punctuation, and laid down the black-edged sheet upon the counter at last, the better to take stock of his victim’s general state of mourning and personal demeanour, asking her with his eye fixed upon her upturned veil if “she were the Party.” She said she was. “Six shillings,” said the clerk. “Will you call for them or have them sent by post?” He referred now to hypothetic replies. She hesitated. “Postage will be extra” the clerk threw in. She said (on consideration) she would call. It had shocked her to note the dreadful havoc wrought in the morale of her purse by the abstraction of six shillings. Truly, the costs of death are almost prohibitive. And no letters of condolence acknowledged the obituary notice. She wondered why. She wondered if she had been wise to emphasize her widowhood, that dubious state too publicly associated with the distressed disposal of furs, cutlery, linen underwear and vertical overstrung pianofortes in ebony and gold. Or if the qualities “patient and conscientious” might not have been better expressed by “energetic and strict disciplinarian.” It had been, perhaps, imprudent to introduce so disputable a topic as religion into her advertisement. But the mischief was done. Nothing short of another six shillings could undo it. Newspaper defunction (plainly) was not for such as her. It was an expedient unprofitable and protracted. Education--like all life’s best and noblest things--was at a discount: a frail plank to clutch at in the drowning moments of necessity. Obviously it could not sustain the heavy advertising expenses that might be justifiable in the case of lodgings (which heaven forbid) or character delineations from handwriting, or second-hand harmoniums. It seemed plain she must henceforth repose her hopes exclusively on doorsteps and bell-pulls.

For such a quest she was but ill-prepared. She lacked the confidence of the born canvasser. Too many considerations oppressed her, she realized. Too many obstacles from the standpoint of those on whom she called. She was too ready to condone excuses; to justify refusal with a smile.

Moreover, she had no system. No system, that is, reducible to any standard of masculine order. But, sweep this test aside, and she was actuated in all she did by a system as complex and as baffling as woman’s own. She never visited the same street on two successive days, or rang at more than one house in a single row, on a single afternoon. She showed a woman’s partiality for contradictories; journeyed each day in a direction diametrically opposite to that pursued the day before. And far from any attempt to fix her personality on the consciousness of Daneborough, she deliberately varied her goings and comings, to the end that she might escape a too continuous publicity. If these houses requited her human confidence reposed in them and received her kindly, she raised her veil. Otherwise she kept it lowered, and took her leave in a crape seclusion without seeing or being seen. And yet, her utter lack of business aptitude apart, few women were better qualified to plead. For when her veil was lifted it revealed a singularly sweet and gentle face; the brows depressed by the weight of recent sorrow; the eyes perhaps a little weary, as though too tired for laughter; the whole countenance lit up by a smile like diffused sunlight, that softened and sweetened it without ever sharpening to that hard and brilliant beam in which the rays of malice or uncharity begin to glitter. Wherein the smile interpreted its owner truly. For Mrs. Holmroyd’s nature stopped short of that assured development which does not scruple to enhance its stature by mounting on to the depreciated qualities of others. Nor had nature lent her the voice for saying unkind things. Had such a voice ever said them they would have been no longer quite unkind.

Timidly she prosecuted the canvass of her little school. At each fresh door her fears revived; her heart beat heavily beneath her deep black veil.

Yet the task, so hard at first to set in motion, once moved gathered a measure of momentum that made it easier. Imperceptibly the system that her sorrow so resisted, seeing no help in her, inaugurated itself. It stereotyped the procedure of her calls. It taught her--as it teaches all who have to live by asking--the comfort of a formula. No longer, in attendance on the opening of doors, did she look vaguely to the spirit to lend her words; she had them all rehearsed and ready. Nor did her formula fail her within doors. This autocrat system, once admitted, governed her completely; coerced her with phrases that she had scarce believed her courage capable of uttering. She must apologize for troubling them at such an inconvenient hour.... But.... And so.... Having to undertake the education of her own two children.... It had been suggested to her.... That she might accept a small number of young pupils to share their studies. It would be company for them and added interest for her. She loved teaching. And children. Her little son was eleven; her daughter eight. Far too young, she felt, to send to school just yet. Therefore she had ventured....

Thus the system ran, imposing itself relentlessly upon her so-called better feelings. For it is only consonant with Mrs. Holmroyd’s character that the discovery of her growing acceptance of this system should fill her with concern. She saw in it the ominous break-up of all true womanhood, of all fine nature. So long as grief remained a dumb and helpless thing, without leadership or direction, so long was it hallowed. But when widowhood admitted the dictatorship of worldly wisdom: when griefs grew practical--what, O! what was likely to become of character? She feared her own had suffered hurt already. She went so far as to enquire of her suspected conscience if these daily visits were being paid out of submission to necessity alone. “Am I,” she asked herself with pious concern, “Am I growing to like them? Am I being led by a love of distraction; the curious desire to pry into strange houses; the secret longing for conversation? By any motive, in a word, except my duty towards Him and Them?”

It was a question on which she arrived at no definite conclusion--save to Hope and Trust Not. For one thing, about this time the slowly ripening fruits of system came to maturity, and all her conscientious scruples were thrown into confusion by the acquirement of a first pupil. Such success seemed like a shaft of sunlight divinely sharpened to pierce sceptic doubt and sanctify courage. Success, whatever may be alleged against it by reformers and fanatics, has an effect not less stimulative of faith than of business energy. Within the week Mrs. Holmroyd’s zeal was rewarded with a second pupil, and before the wave of uplifted thankfulness had left her, with a third.

It was a school already. Before such a token of prosperity how could she hesitate longer? Without delay she bought some benches for her school to sit on, and two scholastic tables of soft white wood. Providence, in a friendly mood and greatly pleased with Mrs. Holmroyd’s gratitude, guided her footsteps to the window of a broker’s shop where a glazed and jaundiced wall-atlas of the ancient world awaited her on a roller with pink tape, at eighteenpence. Also an imposing ebony ruler somewhat too heavy for the adroit rapping of knuckles, but useful to point with. A basketful of scholastic books, graded in size to suit all ages, completed the bargain. Filled with a new importance Oswald and his sister took turns at carrying these proud possessions home.

6

Thus the little school was founded. The varnished atlas went upon the wall in the room on the first floor that overlooked the street. The new planed benches flanked the two deal tables and contributed the bleakness apposite to learning.

Here, day by day, from half past nine till twelve, and from two o’clock till four, Mrs. Holmroyd directed the education of her charges. Of these, including her own two children, there were a dozen all but one. They constituted, for the most part, a mixed and sickly lot; the fragile residuum of families too backward or too delicate for ordinary schools. There was the little daughter of a confectioner in the Market Square whose eyes were weak, so that their close application to books was out of the question, and she must sit stanching them with her handkerchief, gazing tearfully from her place as if she wept a parent dead and dear. There was a feeble little fellow, too, the son of a neighbouring plumber, who had swallowed part of his father’s soldering outfit in infancy, and forthwith ceased to grow. There was the little daughter of a nonconformist minister, suffering from a respiratory affection that to-day would be unhesitatingly identified as Adenoids, who, furnished with a slate and pencil, was convulsed to the verge of suffocation in the tracing of a single pothook. Each seemed to suffer from some ailment or a habit. The manners of most were tainted. They came from homes of humble commerce and of petty trade, bringing with them their heritage of congenital idiosyncracies: the shameless sniff, the hiccough unabashed; an assortment of mannerisms as varied as it was unlovely. Mrs. Holmroyd feared the influence of all these imperfections on her children--but what was to be done? Such horrible habits (when providentially there should be more of them) represented the daily bread for her and hers. She must not quarrel with the crusts that fed them.

They fed them barely; they did not feed them quite. Twelve scholars all but one (and two of these her unprofitable own) at thirty shillings a quarter payable in advance or in arrear, or by arrangement, subject to a reduction for sisters, brothers, near relatives, or even friends, do not yield a superabundance. The afflicted offspring of the plumber, made sickly by the inconstant piece of metal in its fitful travel through his system, would absent himself at intervals from school. Despite the most solicitous enquiries on the part of Mrs. Holmroyd, who wasted not a moment after school was over in calling with her children at the plumber’s home, these absences (consolidated like the plumber’s time-sheet) reappeared at pay-day in the guise of a plea for reduction. Similarly, the eyes of the pastrycook’s daughter which debarred her from participating to the full extent in the advantages of Mrs. Holmroyd’s instruction, furnished a tearful reason for rebate. The daughter of the nonconformist minister alleged the closeness of the schoolroom as a cause of headache; the nonconformist minister’s wife wondered, in making reference to the subject, if Mrs. Holmroyd thought her room was really large enough to serve the cause of education. The cold acquired by another scholar was charged against the schoolroom’s too prevalent fresh air. Only widows with two children and no means beyond the margin of a precarious deposit at the bank can realize the awful responsibilities incurred by the keeping of a school, where every sniffle overt or concealed is viewed by apprehension as the possible precursor of an epidemic calculated to bring scholasticism to ruin; where life’s edifice, in short, is reared on no surer, stabler foundation that the whims and healths of fitful children.

Thus was she, by a natural transition, led on to pork pies and sausages. For it seemed clear that this home could derive no adequate security from a dozen assorted ailments. Some other method must be thought of. Her pride must make some further sacrifice if necessary. And as it was necessary, her pride came down to pork pies and sausages. Not ordinary pork pies. Not ordinary sausages. But pork pies and sausages such as had been made in more prosperous days, by the faithful servant of her girlhood, whose footsteps to Daneborough she had followed. Such pies as Hannah once had made--if Mrs. Holmroyd could but recapture the recipe--possessed a soulful flavour, a sanctity of their own. The finest ingredients--care, skill, love, clean hands and a strict conscience--were requisite to make them as Hannah used to make them, and as they should be made. These qualities Mrs. Holmroyd had. Best of all, the pies might be baked in her own kitchen; in the bosom of her family. Composed faithfully to formula, and offered tentatively to the world at first through the medium of her little school, within a month Mrs. Holmroyd’s pies and sausages had achieved at least a minor reputation. Every Friday evening when her scholars were disbanded for the week, and the spirit of learning in the deserted schoolroom drew the mantle of intensest silence about her shoulders and subsided into academic abstraction, the kitchen fire was coaxed to glow.

And every Friday, tea being over, the little Oswald donned his cap and gloves, and, when the dark nights needed--which, to his mother’s anxious heart in the variable pork-pie season they generally did--his overcoat and knitted muffler, and made the round of all their customers, filled with manly self-importance and many fears.