Part I Chapter 9 Dumps — A Plain Girl by L. T. Meade
The Professor Leaves Home
As I took my place in class I observed that all the girls stared at me; and after staring, one whispered to another, and then they stared again. It was really very confusing. After a time I did not like it. I thought they were impertinent. I could have borne with the stares and all the nudges and the whispers if I had been wearing my dark-blue dress with the grey fur, for I should have put down the curious behaviour of my schoolfellows to the fact of the dress: they were admiring the dress; they were jealous of the dress. But I had gone to school that morning just the ordinary Dumps—Dumps in clothes she had grown out of, Dumps with a somewhat untidy head, Dumps with her plain face. Why should the girls look at me? It was not possible that the good food I had eaten and the happy life I had led at Miss Donnithorne’s could have made such a marvellous difference in so short a time—just about three days and a half.
But my lessons were more absorbing than usual, and I forgot the girls. In the playground I resolved to avoid the Swans, and in order to do this I went up to Augusta Moore and slipped my hand through her arm.
“Do let us walk about,” I said, “and let us be chums, if you don’t mind.”
“Chums?” said Augusta, turning her dreamy, wonderful eyes upon my face.
“Yes,” I said.
“But chums have tastes in common,” was her next remark.
“Well, you are very fond of books, are you not?” I said.
“Fond of books!” cried Augusta. “Fond of books! I love them. But that is not the right word: I reverence them; I have a passion for them.”
She looked hurriedly round her. “I shall never marry,” she continued in a low whisper, “but I shall surround myself with books—the books of the great departed; their words, their thoughts, shall fill my brain and my heart. I shall be satisfied; nothing else will satisfy me but books, books, books!”
“Do come to this corner of the playground,” I said. “You speak as though you were reciting, and if you raise your voice the least bit in the world some one will hear you, and we shall have a crowd round us.”
She obeyed me. She was in a world of her own. As I looked at her I thought she was marvellously like the Professor in her mind.
“It is a dreadful pity,” I said.
“What is a pity?” she asked.
“That you are not me, and I am not you.”
“Oh dear,” she said, “how you do mix things up! How could I be you?”
“Well, if you lived with the Professor—if you were his child—you’d have books; you’d live in the world you love.”
Her eyes lit up then. They really were fine eyes, although she was—I could not help feeling it—a most provoking girl.
“That would be paradise,” she said. “But that can never happen. It never does happen. Men like your marvellous, your wonderful father have commonplace children like you. Now I, who have all the instincts and all that soul within me that just burns for books, and books alone, have a painfully commonplace mother. It is a mixed world. It is painfully mixed.”
“Well, at any rate let us be chums,” I said, for the Swans were getting nearer and nearer.
“Oh, as you please, Dumps. But you mustn’t interrupt my work; I always avoid having a girl chum, because she is sure to interrupt. If you like to walk with me in recess you may.”
“Oh, I should, Augusta—I should! I find the other girls so chattery and so queer. I don’t understand them.”
“Well, naturally, to-day they’re excited,” said Augusta.
She looked full at me.
“What about?” I said.
“Why, about you.”
“But why in the world about me? What has happened to me? Have I grown—grown beautiful?”
I coloured as I said the words. Another girl would have laughed, but Augusta did not; it was not her way.
“You are very plain indeed,” she said calmly; “you have not one feature which could possibly, at any time, grow into a beautiful feature. But that doesn’t matter. You have privileges. Every evening you can look at the Professor and think how marvellous is his brain and how beautiful is his face. Oh, do you think there is any chance of my being able to get a ticket for the next meeting of the Royal Society? He is going to speak. I could listen to him; I could hang on his words.”
I made no answer; but I made a special resolution. It was quite impossible for me to be friends with Augusta Moore. She was looking at me at that moment, however, with great attention.
“I tell you what it is,” she said; “if you are inclined to be friends with me, you might now and then get me tickets for your father’s lectures. I mean, of course,” she added, colouring very much, “that is, when you do not want them yourself.”
“I never go to them,” I said fervently. “I would not go to them for all the world.”
“How queer of you!”
“I think I can promise to get you two tickets for the next meeting of the Royal Society,” I said, “if it will make you really happy. Father was busy over his lecture last night. It has gone to be typed this morning.”
“Oh, don’t!” said Augusta, with a shudder.
“Don’t what?”
“Make the thing so realistic. Leave it, I beseech of you, leave it in the clouds. Don’t show me the ropes, but get me the tickets. Do! I shall worship you. I will even think you beautiful if you can get me tickets for your father’s lectures.”
“I’ll see; I’ll speak to him to-day.”
Augusta glanced nervously round.
“Do you think it would be possible for you to bring them to our house? We live just outside Inverness Terrace, Bayswater. You could come by the Tube. I would meet you, and I’d bring you home. We have only three rooms, mother and I—a sort of flat at the top of the house. I come every day to this school because it is thought quite the best in London. It doesn’t take long by the Twopenny Tube. You have a station not far from your house. You could come, could you not?”
“I could come, of course.”
“Well then, let me see. Shall I meet you at four o’clock to-day just outside the Bayswater Station? I’ll be there when you come.”
The bell rang for us to return to school.
“I’ll come,” I said.
“I’ll have quite a nice tea for you—that is, if you care for food.”
“I do—I love it,” I said in a stout voice. Augusta did not smile. She went very gravely back to the school. She had forgotten me; she was a sort of female Professor. I certainly did not like her, and yet I would get her the tickets and go to her house. She was better than the Swans.
Agnes Swan came up to me when school was over.
“You have been nasty in your ways to-day, Dumps,” she said. “Can’t you stay a minute now?”
“No,” I said, “I cannot I must run all the way home; I am late.”
“Nonsense! Well, will you come to tea with us to-night?”
“No, thank you,” I replied; “I have an engagement.”
“Oh, she’ll have heaps of engagements from this out!” said Rita. “Don’t worry her. She’ll be much too grand to speak to us by-and-by.”
“I have an engagement,” I replied. “I am going to tea with Augusta Moore.”
“Oh, with that old frump!”
“She is an exceedingly clever girl.”
“But you and she have nothing in common, Dumps.”
“Yes, we have,” I replied. “Have we not a Professor in common?” I murmured to myself; and then I left the Swans standing discomfited, their faces all agog with longing to tell me something which I would on no account hear from their lips.
I hurried back to the house. To my joy, father was in. He was very neatly dressed. I had not seen him so smart for a long time. “Why, father!” I said.
“I am leaving home to-night,” was his remark. “I shall be away for a little. I shall be back presently. You will get a letter from me.”
“But, father, the lecture at the Royal Society?” I said.
“That is not until next Wednesday, this day week. I shall be back again by then. I shall return probably on Sunday, or Monday morning. My dear child, don’t gape. Another man is taking my place at the school. Here, Dumps, here; you’d like five shillings, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh yes, father.”
It did not really greatly matter to me whether my dear father was in the house or not. I was bewildered at his going; it was quite amazing that he should get any one else to take his boys in the middle of term, but it did not seriously affect my interests or my peace. “You have a very smart coat on,” I said.
“Have I?” he replied, shrugging his shoulders. “Well, if it pleases you it will please other women. Can’t understand why people look so much at the exterior. Exterior matters nothing. It is how the brain is worked, how the mind tells on the body, how the soul is moved. Those are the things that matter.”
“Father, have you had any food?”
“Yes; Hannah gave me a chop.”
There was a bone from a mutton-chop on a plate near by, but there seemed to be no appearance of a meal for me, and I was very hungry.
“The boys are dining at the school to-day,” said my father. “Now, my child, it is time for me to be off.”
“But one minute first. There is a girl at school—”
“There are two hundred girls at your school. Which special one do you now allude to?”
“Her name is Augusta Moore. She has a love for books, somewhat as you have a love for books.”
The Professor raised one hand.
“I beseech of you, Dumps,” he said, “don’t speak of any girl’s immature admiration for the great works of the mighty dead. Don’t! Your words will get on my nerves.”
“Well, I won’t; but she wants to learn, and I suppose she has a right to,” I said in a somewhat dogged tone. “She has begged of me to ask you to give her two tickets for next Wednesday when you are lecturing at the Royal Society. She wants two, for she would not be allowed to go alone.”
For answer my father stalked across the room. He crossed the wide hall and entered his own study, a room he seldom used, for he did most of his home work in his bedroom. He came back presently with a couple of tickets and threw them on the table.
“There,” he said; “don’t say anything more about her. Don’t worry me on the subject. Good-bye, my little girl.”
He stooped and kissed me; his kiss was more affectionate than usual.
“Be a good girl, Dumps. What I do I do for my children’s sake.”
“Of course, father;” I said, touched by the feeling which seemed to be in the kiss he had just bestowed upon me.
“By the way, Dumps, I gave you that picture of your mother?”
“Oh yes, father; but I have not looked at it yet.”
“It is a good likeness,” he said. “She was a pretty woman, and a good wife to me; I never forget that. I don’t forget it now. Good-bye, Dumps.”
“You will write, father?”
“Yes, yes; anyhow you will hear. Good-bye, child; good-bye.”
I followed him into the hall. There was a neat little Gladstone bag on a chair. It really was brand-new, and it had his initials on it.
“Why,” I said, taking it up in my hand, “this is exactly the same sort of bag as my trunk—I mean it is such very new-looking leather. How pretty! When did you get it?”
“Don’t be inquisitive, child. Is it new? Upon my word! Well, that’s all right. Good-bye, good-bye, Dumps.”
He snatched up the bag and went out, banging the hall door. I went straight back to the parlour and pulled the bell. I pulled it twice in desperation. There was no response of any sort.
“Hannah gets worse and worse,” I thought. I was ravenously hungry. There was not a scrap of preparation for a meal on the table, only the glass out of which father had drunk his accustomed quantity of beer, and the bone of the mutton-chop, and a small piece of bread. Hannah was certainly in her deafest and worst humour, and the cotton-wool was sticking firmly into her right ear.
I ran downstairs. I entered the kitchen.
“Sakes!” said Hannah.
I went close to her and dexterously put out my hand and removed the cotton-wool from her ear.
“Miss Dumps, how dare you?”
“I want my dinner,” I said.
“Sakes! What with frying chops for the Professor, and him going off in a hurry, why, my head is in a moil.”
“Hannah,” I said, “I must have some food. I am awfully hungry.”
“Well, set down right there by the kitchen table and I’ll give you another chop,” said Hannah. “I hear the Professor’s not coming back to-night. It’s the very queerest thing I remember happening since your poor mother died. But you set there and I’ll grill a chop for you, and you shall have it piping hot, and potatoes as well. There, now, what do you say to that?”
I thought I would oblige Hannah to any extent with the prospect of such a meal in front of me, and accordingly I sat down while she prepared the chop and potatoes. Presently she brought them to me, and I ate them with the satisfaction which only a hungry schoolgirl can feel when she is seldom given a satisfying meal.
“Master said to me just before he left, ‘Tidy up the house a bit, Hannah.’ Never heard him make such a remark before in all my life since your poor mother were took.”
“You remember mother very well, don’t you, Hannah?”
“Bless her! yes, I have memories.”
Hannah looked very thoughtful.
“Do sit down,” I said. “You and I are alone in the house.”
“You are her mortal image,” said Hannah as she sank into her chair.
“I like mother?”
“Not in face, but in ways. You have a sort of coaxing way with you, and your temper is good—I will say that. But God only knows who you hark back with regard to face, for you are plain, Dumps, there’s no doubt of that.”
“So every one says—that is, every one except Mr Von Marlo.”
“That queer Dutch boy—that foreigner? Nobody minds what foreigners say.”
“Still, it is nice sometimes, by somebody, to be called even fairly good-looking,” I responded.
“Maybe you’re in Dutch style,” said Hannah. “I always was told they had flattened-out faces, same as the Dutch dolls, you know.”
This remark was scarcely flattering; but then Hannah, on principle, never did flatter.
“Tell me about mother,” I said. “What was she really like?”
“Mr Alex takes after her. Eyes blue as the sky, a tender, gentle face, rather tall, rather slim, the sweetest of voices.”
“Why did she die?” I asked.
My own voice trembled.
“Killed, child—killed.”
“Killed?” I exclaimed. “I never heard that.”
“Oh, there are ways of doing the job! She weren’t killed by any accident—not by fire, nor by water, nor by a street accident—but just she wanted what she couldn’t get.”
“And what was that?”
“Why, the understanding of the sort of man she had married. He is real good is the Professor, downright good at heart, but he wanted a different sort of wife from your mother, some one as could rouse him and take him by the shoulders and shake him. That’s the sort he wanted, and she weren’t the kind. So, you see, she hadn’t enough sunshine, and by-and-by the want of sunshine killed her. Yes, she were killed if ever a woman were killed; yes, that’s it—killed.”
I started to my feet.
“You really are very melancholy, Hannah.”
“And why in the name of fortune should I be merry? What’s to make me merry?”
“Well, we all have to make the best of things. Miss Donnithorne says so.”
“Don’t you mention the name of that hussy to me!”
“Hannah, you have no right to call her that. She is a most sweet, dear, charming woman.”
“Get you out of my kitchen, Dumps!”
“Hannah, what do you mean?”
“Mean? I don’t want that woman coming fussing round the place, making up to you, dressing you up—I know what it means. Don’t you talk to me. Get along, Dumps, or I’ll say something angry. Now then, out you go!”
Hannah pushed the cotton-wool well into her ear with her thumb, and after that I knew that I might as well talk to a deaf and dumb image.