About half the children in the class went home and asked their parents the meaning of the word ‘womb’. There was a sudden commotion, a flying to and fro of messages, an electric thrill of horror through fifteen decent Nonconformist homes. That night the parents must have held some kind of conclave, for the following evening, about the time when school ended, a deputation called upon Mrs Creevy. Dorothy heard them arriving by ones and twos, and guessed what was going to happen. As soon as she had dismissed the children, she heard Mrs Creevy call sharply down the stairs:
‘Come up here a minute, Miss Millborough!’
Dorothy went up, trying to control the trembling of her knees. In the gaunt drawing-room Mrs Creevy was standing grimly beside the piano, and six parents were sitting round on horsehair chairs like a circle of inquisitors. There was the Mr Geo. Briggs who had written the letter about Mabel’s arithmetic–he was an alert-looking greengrocer with a dried-up, shrewish wife–and there was a large, buffalo-like man with drooping moustaches and a colourless, peculiarly flat wife who looked as though she had been flattened out by the pressure of some heavy object–her husband, perhaps. The names of these two Dorothy did not catch. There was also Mrs Williams, the mother of the congenital idiot, a small, dark, very obtuse woman who always agreed with the last speaker, and there was a Mr Poynder, a commercial traveller. He was a youngish to middle-aged man with a grey face, mobile lips, and a bald scalp across which some strips of rather nasty-looking damp hair were carefully plastered. In honour of the parents’ visit, a fire composed of three large coals was sulking in the grate.
‘Sit down there, Miss Millborough,’ said Mrs Creevy, pointing to a hard chair which stood like a stool of repentance in the middle of the ring of parents.
Dorothy sat down.
‘And now,’ said Mrs Creevy, ‘just you listen to what Mr Poynder’s got to say to you.’
Mr Poynder had a great deal to say. The other parents had evidently chosen him as their spokesman, and he talked till flecks of yellowish foam appeared at the corners of his mouth. And what was remarkable, he managed to do it all–so nice was his regard for the decencies–without ever once repeating the word that had caused all the trouble.
‘I feel that I’m voicing the opinion of all of us,’ he said with his facile bagman’s eloquence, ‘in saying that if Miss Millborough knew that this play–Macduff, or whatever its name is–contained such words as–well, such words as we’re speaking about, she never ought to have given it to the children to read at all. To my mind it’s a disgrace that schoolbooks can be printed with such words in them. I’m sure if any of us had ever known that Shakespeare was that kind of stuff, we’d have put our foot down at the start. It surprises me, I must say. Only the other morning I was reading a piece in my News Chronicle about Shakespeare being the father of English Literature; well, if that’s Literature, let’s have a bit less Literature, say I! I think everyone’ll agree with me there. And on the other hand, if Miss Millborough didn’t know that the word–well, the word I’m referring to–was coming, she just ought to have gone straight on and taken no notice when it did come. There wasn’t the slightest need to go explaining it to them. Just tell them to keep quiet and not get asking questions–that’s the proper way with children.’
‘But the children wouldn’t have understood the play if I hadn’t explained!’ protested Dorothy for the third or fourth time.
‘Of course they wouldn’t! You don’t seem to get my point, Miss Millborough! We don’t want them to understand. Do you think we want them to go picking up dirty ideas out of books? Quite enough of that already with all these dirty films and these twopenny girls’ papers that they get hold of–all these filthy, dirty love-stories with pictures of–well, I won’t go into it. We don’t send our children to school to have ideas put into their heads. I’m speaking for all the parents in saying this. We’re all of decent God-fearing folk–some of us are Baptists and some of us are Methodists, and there’s even one or two Church of England among us; but we can sink our differences when it comes to a case like this–and we try to bring our children up decent and save them from knowing anything about the Facts of Life. If I had my way, no child–at any rate, no girl–would know anything about the Facts of Life till she was twenty-one.’
There was a general nod from the parents, and the buffalo-like man added, ‘Yer, yer! I’m with you there, Mr Poynder. Yer, yer!’ deep down in his inside.
After dealing with the subject of Shakespeare, Mr Poynder added some remarks about Dorothy’s new-fangled methods of teaching, which gave Mr Geo. Briggs the opportunity to rap out from time to time, ‘That’s it! Practical work–that’s what we want–practical work! Not all this messy stuff like po’try and making maps and sticking scraps of paper and such like. Give ’em a good bit of figuring and handwriting and bother the rest. Practical work! You’ve said it!’
This went on for about twenty minutes. At first Dorothy attempted to argue, but she saw Mrs Creevy angrily shaking her head at her over the buffalo-like man’s shoulder, which she rightly took as a signal to be quiet. By the time the parents had finished they had reduced Dorothy very nearly to tears, and after this they made ready to go. But Mrs Creevy stopped them.
‘Just a minute, ladies and gentlemen,’ she said. ‘Now that you’ve all had your say–and I’m sure I’m most glad to give you the opportunity–I’d just like to say a little something on my own account. Just to make things clear, in case any of you might think I was to blame for this nasty business that’s happened. And you stay here too, Miss Millborough!’ she added.
She turned on Dorothy, and, in front of the parents, gave her a venomous ‘talking to’ which lasted upwards of ten minutes. The burden of it all was that Dorothy had brought these dirty books into the house behind her back; that it was monstrous treachery and ingratitude; and that if anything like it happened again, out Dorothy would go with a week’s wages in her pocket. She rubbed it in and in and in. Phrases like ‘girl that I’ve taken into my house’, ‘eating my bread’, and even ‘living on my charity’, recurred over and over again. The parents sat round watching, and in their crass faces–faces not harsh or evil, only blunted by ignorance and mean virtues–you could see a solemn approval, a solemn pleasure in the spectacle of sin rebuked.
Dorothy understood this; she understood that it was necessary that Mrs Creevy should give her her ‘talking to’ in front of the parents, so that they might feel that they were getting their money’s worth and be satisfied. But still, as the stream of mean, cruel reprimand went on and on, such anger rose in her heart that she could with pleasure have stood up and struck Mrs Creevy across the face. Again and again she thought, ‘I won’t stand it, I won’t stand it any longer! I’ll tell her what I think of her and then walk straight out of the house!’ But she did nothing of the kind. She saw with dreadful clarity the helplessness of her position. Whatever happened, whatever insults it meant swallowing, she had got to keep her job. So she sat still, with pink humiliated face, amid the circle of parents, and presently her anger turned to misery, and she realized that she was going to begin crying if she did not struggle to prevent it. But she realized, too, that if she began crying it would be the last straw and the parents would demand her dismissal. To stop herself, she dug her nails so hard into the palms that afterwards she found that she had drawn a few drops of blood.
Presently the ‘talking to’ wore itself out in assurances from Mrs Creevy that this should never happen again and that the offending Shakespeares should be burnt immediately. The parents were now satisfied. Dorothy had had her lesson and would doubtless profit by it; they did not bear her any malice and were not conscious of having humiliated her. They said good-bye to Mrs Creevy, said good-bye rather more coldly to Dorothy, and departed. Dorothy also rose to go, but Mrs Creevy signed to her to stay where she was.
‘Just you wait a minute,’ she said ominously as the parents left the room. ‘I haven’t finished yet, not by a long way I haven’t.’
Dorothy sat down again. She felt very weak at the knees, and nearer to tears than ever. Mrs Creevy, having shown the parents out by the front door, came back with a bowl of water and threw it over the fire–for where was the sense of burning good coals after the parents had gone? Dorothy supposed that the ‘talking to’ was going to begin afresh. However, Mrs Creevy’s wrath seemed to have cooled–at any rate, she had laid aside the air of outraged virtue that it had been necessary to put on in front of the parents.
‘I just
