Cat Among the Pigeons - Agatha Christie [77]
“You thought so then?” Eileen Rich stared at her. “But I thought—we all thought—that Miss Vansittart….”
“There was no arrangement made with Miss Vansittart,” said Miss Bulstrode. “I had her in mind, I will confess. I’ve had her in mind for the last two years. But something’s always held me back from saying anything definite to her about it. I daresay everyone assumed that she’d be my successor. She may have thought so herself. I myself thought so until very recently. And then I decided that she was not what I wanted.”
“But she was so suitable in every way,” said Eileen Rich. “She would have carried out things in exactly your ways, in exactly your ideas.”
“Yes,” said Miss Bulstrode, “and that’s just what would have been wrong. You can’t hold on to the past. A certain amount of tradition is good but never too much. A school is for the children of today. It’s not for the children of fifty years ago or even of thirty years ago. There are some schools in which tradition is more important than others, but Meadowbank is not one of those. It’s not a school with a long tradition behind it. It’s a creation, if I may say it, of one woman. Myself. I’ve tried certain ideas and carried them out to the best of my ability, though occasionally I’ve had to modify them when they haven’t produced the results I’d expected. It’s not been a conventional school, but it has not prided itself on being an unconventional school either. It’s a school that tries to make the best of both worlds: the past and the future, but the real stress is on the present. That’s how it’s going to go on, how it ought to go on. Run by someone with ideas—ideas of the present day. Keeping what is wise from the past, looking forward towards the future. You’re very much the age I was when I started here but you’ve got what I no longer can have. You’ll find it written in the Bible. Their old men dream dreams and their young men have visions. We don’t need dreams here, we need vision. I believe you to have vision and that’s why I decided that you were the person and not Eleanor Vansittart.”
“It would have been wonderful,” said Eileen Rich. “Wonderful. The thing I should have liked above all.”
Miss Bulstrode was faintly surprised by the tense, although she did not show it. Instead she agreed promptly.
“Yes,” she said, “it would have been wonderful. But it isn’t wonderful now? Well, I suppose I understand that.”
“No, no, I don’t mean that at all,” said Eileen Rich. “Not at all. I—I can’t go into details very well, but if you had—if you had asked me, spoken to me like this a week or a fortnight ago, I should have said at once that I couldn’t, that it would have been quite impossible. The only reason why it—why it might be possible now is because—well, because it is a case of fighting—of taking on things. May I—may I think it over, Miss Bulstrode? I don’t know what to say now.”
“Of course,” said Miss Bulstrode. She was still surprised. One never really knew, she thought, about anybody.
II
“There goes Rich with her hair coming down again,” said Ann Shapland as she straightened herself up from a flower bed. “If she can’t control it I can’t think why she doesn’t get it cut off. She’s got a good-shaped head and she would look better.”
“You ought to tell her so,” said Adam.
“We’re not on those terms,” said Ann Shapland. She went on, “D’you think this place will be able to carry on?”
“That’s a very doubtful question,” said Adam, “and who am I to judge?”
“You could tell as well as another I should think,” said Ann Shapland. “It might, you know. The old Bull, as the girls call her, has got what it takes. A hypnotizing effect on parents to begin with. How long is it since the beginning of term—only a month? It seems like a year. I shall be glad when it comes to an end.”
“Will you come back if the school goes on?”
“No,” said Ann with emphasis, “no indeed. I’ve had