Clare escaped and tried to obtain a clearer account of the facts from Miss Geary, the one assistant mistress who had stayed at Paston Hall throughout the summer holiday. In the interval which elapsed before she found her, Clare began to feel the full weight of the news. She had not known death before. With it, a strange importance seemed to have shouldered its way bulkily into Paston Hall's affairs and into Clare's own life. She had been living through the summer holiday in a kind of mellow haze of anticipation, gilding the term to come with fancies of delight. Death blew the haze away and revealed a drabness stretching endlessly onward.
At once the attractions of study and the possibility of success seemed to disappear with Anne's death. Special work for the Oxford scholarship now resolved itself into a mere continuance of the dispiriting sequence of lessons she had been groaning through for the last five years. With a new, ruthless clarity of vision she saw that to sit for the scholarship without the coaching of someone like Anne was folly; she accepted the defeat, but she was bewildered and bruised in mind by the tragic excess of the power that had been used to obliterate her dream; she could not yet see her little defeat as a mere incident in a monstrous thing's passage.
Miss Geary was an aboriginaclass="underline" a teacher at Paston Hall since its foundation. Successive generations of new girls had unquestioningly accepted from their seniors her nick−name of “Queery” and with it the traditional belief that she was not in perfect possession of all her faculties. The juniors, instructed by school−girl literature, approved an eccentric and gratefully diverted themselves with all the little peculiarities of her appearance, her dress, her voice and her absent−minded habits; the Middle School subscribed to a theory that she was a poor relation of one of the Governors, and treated her with the scorn proper to her situation; the Seniors, when they thought about her at all, dismissed her as a poor old thing.
When Clare, concealing the lesser death that had occurred in her own heart, asked bluntly what Miss Otterel had died of, the old lady stroked away her straight grey hair from her brow, narrowed her eyes and held back her head as if regarding Clare from very far away, from one of the remote plateaux of reverie where she spent most of her waking hours; then, suddenly descending the cliffs, as it were, bent her head, and articulated precisely:
“Infantile paralysis. It's become serious in Pentabridge.” She nodded and was about to walk on.
“But,” said Clare, detaining her boldly and speaking with the authority of her unhappiness, “what was she doing in Pentabridge? Why didn't she go home for the holidays?”
Miss Geary retreated to her plateau.
“I haven't the least idea,” she murmured, addressing someone, it seemed, invisible to Clare.
The term began; the girls came back, but not Clare's generation. The new Sixth Form seemed to her impossibly young, garrulous and stupid. She had not the patience to learn their slang or the intricacies of their internal relations. She constituted a form by herself and the others were slightly in awe of her. They left her alone.
The gap of the summer holiday and the substitution of a new Sixth Form for the familiar crowd with whom she had come up in the school put the previous summer term at a vastly greater distance from her than a mere eight weeks of calendar time. She looked at the few notes Anne Otterel had made for her at the end of the last term, looked at the programme of study they had fleetingly discussed, and the ideas and projects they represented seemed to her to belong to another life, as unassimilable with this as those distinct, isolated existences she had led in summer months in Spain long ago.
Miss Sperrod made spasmodic, bright pretences to plan Clare's studies, and Miss Geary, in a discursive way, took on the supervision of her French reading; but none of this carried conviction. The plain fact stared Clare bleakly in the face every time she sat down to her books, that there was no one at Paston Hall now who had the least conception of what was necessary for a scholarship examination. She had until the following Easter to find her own way about the ground to be covered for the syllabus, and she recognised that she was completely lost.
For a time she persisted, in a mechanical fashion, with the programme Miss Otterel had sketched out for her; but without Miss Otterel's presence and the stimulating desire to please her, she slipped little by little into reading only the things that immediately interested her, leaving the rest. By the end of the autumn term her reading was almost exclusively the English novelists and modern English and French poets. The French classical dramatists bored her, and the Latin she had to acquire baffled her. There had never been a Latin teacher at Paston Hall. Arrangements had been made for the very few girls who needed enough to scrape through the School Certificate examination to be coached by a mistress from Pentabridge High School, who came one or two evenings during the week in the terms when Miss Sperrod was entering a candidate. Clare had somehow managed to reach a pass standard two years before, but what she had learned then had since fled. She had secretly resolved to work her utmost with Miss Ottereclass="underline" to learn the whole Latin Primer by heart, if need be; to read and translate ten verses of Vergil every day, to make the Odes of Horace her own. She looked at her books now and saw all the dreary, unrewarding grind she would have to undertake alone, and abandoned the project in despair.
It was in this mood of defeat that, one night late in the autumn term, she did something she had not done for four years. She crept down from her room after eleven o'clock, climbed out of the Prefects' Room window and prowled about the grounds for two or three hours. Once it had been an adventurous secret, closely guarded among her gang of friends. In the Third Form they had discovered that it was easy to get out by this particular window. They had taken care to keep the catch oiled, and they had a route across the lawn outside which took them quickly out of sight from any windows of the school. About once a week they climbed out and picnicked in the small wood at the bottom of the grounds; the gardener's boy was suborned to bring them sausages and eggs and tea from Halliwell village, and they had found a place by the wall where they could make a fire without the slightest danger of its light being seen from the school. For four or five terms, summer and winter, the gang kept up the practice; then, at their metamorphosis into Middle−School girls, the adventure became insipid and a little ridiculous to them and they abandoned it. But their secret was never discovered and never disclosed to any of the juniors following them on through the school.
Clare reverted to it simply because the most urgent need in her life now was to get away from Paston Hall. Her longing to have a life of her own, a place of her own, some privacy and freshness, something untainted by school and Miss Sperrod's influence, had become intolerably strong. The bedroom, which, as Head−Girl, she had to herself, was her own, but it was too cramped; its scratched furniture, worn rug and pencilled woodwork were too recently inherited; they smelled of school. The grounds were spacious, but the pseudo−Gothic turrets and gables of Paston Hall dominated them, and on one side a high bounding wall, on the other a gaunt iron fence, laid hard emphasis on the limits of freedom. Clare remembered from Third Form days how night changed the world and how those who ranged it made their own laws. The night could be one's own place of privacy and freedom and freshness. The Prefects' Room window still opened as silently as ever; she had but to push the catch to roam a kingdom that might be boundless.