"Don't jog along," said Miss Violence. "The lines shouldflow, dear. Pretend you're a fountain." Although she herself was lumpy and inelegant, she had high standards of delicacy and a long list of things she wanted us to pretend to be: flowering trees, butterflies, the gentle breezes. Anything but little girls with dirty knees and their fingers up their noses: about matters of personal hygiene she was fastidious.
"Don't chew your coloured pencils, dear," said Miss Violence to Laura. "You aren't a rodent. Look, your mouth is all green. It's bad for your teeth."
I read Evangeline, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; I read Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. "Beautiful," sighed Miss Violence. She was gushy, or as gushy as her dejected nature would allow, on the subject of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; also E. Pauline Johnson, the Mohawk Princess.
"Stirring, dear," said Miss Violence.
Or I read Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a man whose majesty was second only to God's, in the opinion of Miss Violence.
With blackest moss the flower-plots Were thickly crusted, one and alclass="underline" The rusted nails fell from the knots That held the pear to the gable-wall… She only said, "My life is dreary, He cometh not," she said; She said, "I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!"
"Why did she wish that?" said Laura, who did not usually show much interest in my recitations. "It was love, dear," said Miss Violence. "It was boundless love. But it was unrequited."
"Why?"
Miss Violence sighed. "It's a poem, dear," she said. "Lord Tennyson wrote it and I suppose he knew best. A poem does not reason why. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty-that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'"
Laura looked at her with scorn, and went back to her colouring. I turned the page: I'd already skimmed the whole poem, and found that nothing else happened in it.
"Lovely, dear," said Miss Violence. She was fond of boundless love, but she was equally fond of hopeless melancholy.
There was a thin book bound in snuff-coloured leather, which had belonged to Grandmother Adelia: The Rub ¥iy ¥t of Omar Khayy ¥m, by Edward Fitzgerald. (Edward Fitzgerald hadn't really written it, and yet he was said to be the author. How to account for it? I didn't try to.) Miss Violence would sometimes read from this book, to show me how poetry ought to be pronounced: A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread-and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness-Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
She gasped out the Oh as if someone had kicked her in the chest; similarly the Thou. I thought it was a lot of fuss to make about a picnic, and wondered what they'd had on the bread. "Of course it wasn't real wine, dear," said Miss Violence. "It refers to the Communion Service."
Would but some wing ¨d Angel ere too late
Arrest the yet unfolded Roll of Fate,
And make the stern Recorder otherwise Enregister, or quite obliterate!
Ah, Love! Could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would we not shatter it to bits-and then Remould it nearer to the heart's Desire!
"So true," said Miss Violence, with a sigh. But she sighed about everything. She fit into Avilion very well-into its obsolete Victorian splendours, its air of aesthetic decay, of departed grace, of wan regret. Her attitudes and even her faded cashmeres went with the wallpaper.
Laura didn't read much. Instead she would copy pictures, or else she'd colour in the black-and-white illustrations in thick, erudite books of travel and history with her coloured pencils. (Miss Violence let her do this, on the assumption that no one else would notice.) Laura had strange but very definite ideas about which colours were required: she'd make a tree blue or red, she'd make the sky pink or green. If there was a picture of someone she disapproved she'd do the face purple or dark grey to obliterate the features.
She liked to draw the pyramids, from a book on Egypt; she liked to colour in the Egyptian idols. Also Assyrian statues with the bodies of winged lions and the heads of eagles or men. That was from a book by Sir Henry Layard, who'd discovered the statues in the ruins of Nineveh and had them shipped to England; they were said to be illustrations of the angels described in the Book of Ezekiel. Miss Violence did not consider these pictures very nice-the statues looked pagan, and also bloodthirsty-but Laura was not to be deterred. In the face of criticism she would just crouch further over the page and colour away as if her life depended on it.
"Back straight, dear," Miss Violence would say. "Pretend your spine is a tree, growing up towards the sun." But Laura was not interested in this kind of pretending.
"I don't want to be a tree," she would say.
"Better a tree than a hunchback, dear," Miss Violence would sigh, "and if you don't pay attention to your posture, that's what you'll turn into."
Much of the time Miss Violence sat by the window and read romantic novels from the lending library. She also liked to leaf through my Grandmother Adelia's tooled-leather scrapbooks, with their dainty embossed invitations carefully glued in, their menus printed up at the newspaper office, and the subsequent newspaper clippings-the charity teas, the improving lectures illustrated by lantern slides-the hardy, amiable travellers to Paris and Greece and even India, the Sweden-borgians, the Fabians, the Vegetarians, all the various promoters of self-improvement, with once in a while something truly outr ©-a missionary to Africa, or the Sahara, or New Guinea, describing how the natives practised witchcraft or hid their women behind elaborate wooden masks or decorated the skulls of their ancestors with red paint and cowrie shells. All the yellowing paper evidence of that luxurious, ambitious, relentless vanished life, which Miss Violence pored over inch by inch, as if remembering it, smiling with gentle vicarious pleasure.
She had a packet of tinsel stars, gold and silver, which she would stick onto things we'd done. Sometimes she took us out to collect wildflowers, which we pressed between two sheets of blotting paper, with a heavy book on top. We grew fond of her, although we didn't cry when she left. She cried, however-wetly, inelegantly, the way she did everything.
I became thirteen. I'd been growing, in ways that were not my fault, although they seemed to annoy Father as much as if they had been. He began to take an interest in my posture, in my speech, in my deportment generally. My clothing should be simple and plain, with white blouses and dark pleated skirts, and dark velvet dresses for church. Clothes that looked like uniforms-that looked like sailor suits, but were not. My shoulders should be straight, with no slouching. I should not sprawl, chew gum, fidget, or chatter. The values he required were those of the army: neatness, obedience, silence, and no evident sexuality. Sexuality, although it was never spoken of, was to be nipped in the bud. He had let me run wild for too long. It was time for me to be taken in hand.
Laura came in for some of this hectoring too, although she had not yet reached the age for it. (What was the age for it? The pubescent age, it's clear to me now. But then I was merely confused. What crime had I committed? Why was I being treated like the inmate of some curious reform school?)
"You're being too hard on the kiddies," said Callista. "They're not boys."
"Unfortunately," said Father.
It was Callista I went to on the day I found I had developed a horrible disease, because blood was seeping out from between my legs: surely I was dying! Callista laughed. Then she explained. "It's just a nuisance," she said. She said I should refer to it as "my friend," or else "a visitor." Reenie had more Presbyterian ideas. "It's the curse," she said. She stopped short of saying that it was yet one more peculiar arrangement of God's, devised to make life disagreeable: it was just the way things were, she said. As for the blood, you tore up rags. (She did not sayblood, she saidmess.) She made me a cup of chamomile tea, which tasted the way spoiled lettuce smelled; also a hot-water bottle, for the cramps. Neither one helped.