pg28948 [186]
Ursula went forward to the teachers' room that burrowed in a gloomy hole. She knocked timidly.
"Come in!" called a surprised man's voice, as from a prison cell. She entered the dark little room that never got any sun. The gas was lighted naked and raw. At the table a thin man in shirt-sleeves was rubbing a paper on a jellytray. He looked up at Ursula with his narrow, sharp face, said "Good morning," then turned away again, and stripped the paper off the tray, glancing at the violet-coloured writing transferred, before he dropped the curled sheet aside among a heap.
Ursula watched him fascinated. In the gaslight and gloom and the narrowness of the room, all seemed unreal.
"Isn't it a nasty morning," she said.
"Yes," he said, "it's not much of weather."
But in here it seemed that neither morning nor weather really existed. This place was timeless. He spoke in an occupied voice, like an echo. Ursula did not know what to say. She took off her waterproof.
"Am I early?" she asked.
The man looked first at a little clock, then at her. His eyes seemed to be sharpened to needle-points of vision.
"Twenty-five past," he said. "You're the second to come. I'm first this morning."
Ursula sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair, and watched his thin red hands rubbing away on the white surface of the paper, then pausing, pulling up a corner of the sheet, peering, and rubbing away again. There was a great heap of curled white-and-scribbled sheets on the table.
"Must you do so many?" asked Ursula.
Again the man glanced up sharply. He was about thirty or thirty-three years old, thin, greenish, with a long nose and a sharp face. His eyes were blue, and sharp as points of steel, rather beautiful, the girl thought.
"Sixty-three," he answered.
"So many!" she said, gently. Then she remembered.
"But they're not all for your class, are they?" she added.
"Why aren't they?" he replied, a fierceness in his voice.
Ursula was rather frightened by his mechanical ignoring of her, and his directness of statement. It was something new to her. She had never been treated like this before, as if she did not count, as if she were addressing a machine.
"It is too many," she said sympathetically.
"You'll get about the same," he said.
That was all she received. She sat rather blank, not knowing how to feel. Still she liked him. He seemed so cross. There was a queer, sharp, keen-edge feeling about him that attracted her and frightened her at the same time. It was so cold, and against his nature.
The door opened, and a short, neutral-tinted young woman of about twenty-eight appeared.
"Oh, Ursula!" the newcomer exclaimed. "You are here early! My word, I'll warrant you don't keep it up. That's Mr. Williamson's peg. This is yours. Standard Five teacher always has this. Aren't you going to take your hat off?"
Miss Violet Harby removed Ursula's waterproof from the peg on which it was hung, to one a little farther down the row. She had already snatched the pins from her own stuff hat, and jammed them through her coat. She turned to Ursula, as she pushed up her frizzed, flat, dun-coloured hair.
"Isn't it a beastly morning," she exclaimed, "beastly! And if there's one thing I hate above another it's a wet Monday morning;—pack of kids trailing in anyhow-nohow, and no holding 'em——"
She had taken a black pinafore from a newspaper package, and was tying it round her waist.
"You've brought an apron, haven't you?" she said jerkily, glancing at Ursula. "Oh—you'll want one. You've no idea what a sight you'll look before half-past four, what with chalk and ink and kids' dirty feet.—Well, I can send a boy down to mamma's for one."
"Oh, it doesn't matter," said Ursula.
"Oh, yes—I can send easily," cried Miss Harby.
Ursula's heart sank. Everybody seemed so cocksure and so bossy. How was she going to get on with such jolty, jerky, bossy people? And Miss Harby had not spoken a word to the man at the table. She simply ignored him. Ursula felt the callous crude rudeness between the two