Miss Hutton looked down at the book in her hand and frowned. “Susan, do you have this play by heart?”
“No, Madam. Only a few lines here and there. We did some of it in the lower school.”
Someone whispered briefly and Miss Hutton silenced the offender with a look. She opened her mouth to speak, thought better of it and nodded briskly as if the subject was closed. Then she had returned the book to Susan, still open, and Susan looked at it as it lay on the desk and at the top of the page were the words “Persons Represented.”
Miss Hutton laughed, not unmusically. She said, “You slipped up there, Susan. The best of us do occasionally.” She became intent again. “You do have that play by heart, don’t you?”
“Yes, Madam.”
“And everything else you ever read for me?”
“Yes, Madam.”
Miss Hutton nodded. “Yes, I know that. Everything, at one reading. But you’re clever, my dear. You veil your mind, as you veil those eyes of yours. ... I don’t know how you do it but that is what you do. . . . Why, Susan? Why? I ask you again, who are you? Or what . . .”
Silence. Then Susan said evenly, “I have a very retentive mind, Miss Hutton.”
The teacher turned away abruptly and seemed to stare at the blackboard. Then she sat down in her chair, rested her elbows on the desk, laid her chin on her laced fingers. She said slowly, “Susan, when I started to teach, many years ago, I had certain ideals. I do not think I had any illusions, I realized that for each little success there would be many, many frustrations and failures and disappointments, but I had ideals. I don’t think I altogether lost them. In fact I know I did not. Within my limitations I have been a good teacher. But now, right at the end, I cannot help a certain feeling of . . . unfulfilment. It seems that I am able to see nothing but the failures, all the children who showed promise who did not realize that promise for one reason or another. And of course for someone like myself who tries to teach from within the pupil rather than applying the arbitrary requirements of syllabus in a process of verbal tarring and feathering, there must be with each child the ultimate disappointment of seeing her, or him, pass beyond your reach into what is generally termed adult life. You are left to guess what sort of person your little half-made creature finally becomes.” She smiled slightly. “In my younger days, of course, things were not quite so hectic. Classes were smaller; we were not fighting the Battle of the Bulge as we do today. All you small people had more room to spread and grow; schools were not manufactories in quite the same sense as they are now. Or perhaps I am already assuming the rosy glasses of the elderly. For I am old.” The smile flicked off, then returned. “I know most of you think of me as already decrepit,” said Miss Hutton. The stock line would have raised a giggle from any fifth-former. This girl did not smile.
Miss Hutton picked up an ebony ruler from the desk and turned it slowly, watching the reflections run along its smooth darkness. She said, “I have realized something about myself at last, Susan. I am a very selfish person.”
Susan did not blink.
The mistress laid the ruler down. She said, “In two weeks’ time, after our little concert and the customary speeches for end of term, there will be a presentation. I shall be given a reading lamp or a Life of Johnson, and I shall make a short parting address wishing you all luck in the years to come and hoping you have a Merry Christmas. There will be three cheers for Miss Hutton. I can hear them now, very penetrating and shrill with the school captain leading them. Then I shall leave.
“I have bought a little cottage, not very far from here. It has a garden, not large and rather wild at the moment. I hope to spend quite a lot of time working on it. I shall dig, and plant, and after a year or so I shall have quite an attractive display of flowers. I shall come back to the school, of course, for Speech Days. For a little while there will be faces amongst you that I know. The little new people may notice me and ask, ‘Who is that?’ and somebody a little older and very scornful will say, “That’s Miss Hutton, who used to teach English.’ But that will pass, and afterwards I will be just another old lady for whom the monitors will have to find a seat. No one will remember.”
Susan reached up and pushed a strand of hair back from her eyes.
“I went to my cottage last weekend,” said Miss Hutton. “I stood in what will be the living room, and looked round the bareness, and planned where I should place this and that piece of furniture. And an odd thought came to me. It seemed that this little room, so still and cold, had been waiting for me for over sixty years. Do you understand how I felt?”
Susan stirred slightly. She said, “Yes Miss Hutton, I do.”
Miss Hutton nodded to herself vaguely. “Of course. Now, Susan, for a senior member of staff to seek counsel of a fifteen-year-old pupil is an act that I consider gross, and that I can only describe as an obscene privilege. But of course you are not a normal child. In fact, as we understand the term, you are not a child at all, are you?”
Very quietly. “No, Madam.”
A shadow seemed to touch the old woman’s face. A muscle twitched in her jaw. She said, “Not a child . . . and there is something at the back of your eyes that should make me afraid. I don’t know why it does not.”
Susan said softly, “How can I help you, Miss Hutton?”
The teacher made shapes in the air with her hands, as if symbols might be better than words to express what she wanted to say. “Susan, perhaps my need is very simple. I should have married. I should have liked children of my own; I could have watched them grow and ripen and marry perhaps, in their own time. But somehow I never got round to marriage. There was always too much to do at school. In a sense, although this will sound very stupid to you, you were all my children. And now you have gone into time, and I am left with my flowers and my little silent room. As I told you, I am selfish. These things should be enough. These and the knowledge that I did my best. But they are not.”
Susan’s eyes were lowered modestly. Her wrist was touching the wood of the desk; she wore a slim watch, and the desk top was acting as a sounding board for the tiny thing so that its ticking seemed to ring in the room.
“Susan,” said Miss Hutton, and her voice whispered and creaked, “I remember you when you came to this school, a little smidgin of a thing, all plaits and eyes. Now you are taller than I. I’ve watched you grow, over the years, and I know, I know, that you have more understanding than I, and more compassion than any of us ... I was tempted to say, than any of us poor humans. And yet by our standards you are a half-grown child.” She shook her head again. “And like any child you are a die, a matrix. But the shape you will stamp out, when you are grown, is past my imagining.”
The girl was silent. Her quietness had a penetrating quality; the gray walls of the rooms, the rows of empty desks seemed in themselves to be listening and waiting.
“I think,” said the mistress, “that what I am asking you to do is to take the place of all my other vanished children. Be my child, Susan. Tell me what you intend to do with yourself. Will you be a doctor, a dancer? An artist perhaps, a scientist? Tell me and I shall be able to follow you, in my mind at least. Perhaps I might even hear of you or see you again one day. By doing this, I think you would make up for all the rest.”
Silence lengthened; the ticking of the watch became louder until it was the noise of a little frenzied machine clacking off irretrievable seconds. Then Susan raised her head. “I’m sorry,” she said simply. “I don’t know what I shall be. So I can’t tell anyone, Miss Hutton. Not even you.”