Lesbians -- Fiction; Psychological fiction; Women teachers -- Fiction
Vision was forced upon Clare, serene in her form-room, swift and sudden
vision. She not only heard, every sense responded. At her feet lay the
waste land of the poem, she smelt the dank air, shrank from the clammy
undergrowth, watched the bowed figure of the wandering knight,
stumbling forwards doggedly. It was coming towards her, the outline
blurred in the evening mist, the face hidden. The voice was surely his?
"Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled
Increasing like a bell."
She heard it alive with warning.
Nearer, ever nearer; the bowed form was at her very feet, as the voice
rose anew in despairing defiance.
"To view the last of me----"
The helmeted head was flung back; the voice echoed from hill to hill--
"I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."
The figure fell, face upwards, at her feet. Clare tore at the visor with
desperate hands, for at the last line, the strong voice had broken,
quavering into the pitiful treble of a frightened child. The bars melted
under her touch, as dream things will, and she was staring down at no
bearded face, but at Louise. Louise herself, with blank, dead eyes in a
broken, blood-flecked face. The dead mouth smiled.
"You see, that was what I meant, Miss Hartill. That atmosphere."
Clare roused herself with a start. Louise, rosily alive, and quivering
with eagerness, was waiting for her comments. She got none.
"Begin again," said Clare mechanically, to the next girl.
The brightness died out of Louise's face, as she subsided in her seat.
Clare, dazed as she was, saw it, and was touched. The child deserved
praise--should not be punished for the vagaries of Clare's own phantasy.
And the monkey could recite! She shook off the impression of that
recital as best she could. Curious, the freaks of the imagination! She
must tell Alwynne of the adventure--Alwynne, dreamer of dreams.... And
Alwynne was interested in Louise; was coaching her.... Perhaps she was
responsible ... had coached her in that very poem? She hoped not ... it
would be interference.... She did not like interference. But no--that
performance was entirely original, she felt sure. There was genius in
the child--sheer genius ... and but for Clare herself, she would yet be
rotting undeveloped in the Lower Third. She was pleased with herself,
pleased with Louise too; ready to tell her so, to see the child's face
light up again delightedly; she was less attractive in repose....
Clare's chance came.
It was the turn of the hockey captain to recite. She appealed to Clare.
"Oh, Miss Hartill! You said I needn't, Louise and I--because of all our
extra work. Not the poem."
Clare considered.
"I remember. Very well. But Louise?" She looked at her questioningly,
half smiling. "When did you find the time?"
Louise laughed.
"I don't know, Miss Hartill. It found itself."
"Ah! And how much extra work have you, Louise?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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