The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark [44]
dragoman in Egypt would not have it that Friday was their Lord's Day. 'Every day is the Lord's day,' he said to me. I thought that very profound, I felt humbled. We had already said our farewells on the day before my departure, Sandy, but lo and behold when I was already seated in the train, along the platform came my dragoman with a beautiful bunch of flowers for me. He had true dignity. Sandy, you will never get anywhere by hunching over your putter, hold your shoulders back and bend from the waist. He was a very splendid person with a great sense of his bearing." They picked up their balls and walked to the next tee. "Have you ever played with Miss Lockhart?" Sandy said. "Does she play golf?" "Yes, rather well." Sandy had met the science mistress surprisingly on the golf course one Saturday morning playing with Gordon Lowther. "Good shot, Sandy. I know very little of Miss Lockhart," said Miss Brodie. "I leave her to her jars and gases. They are all gross materialists, these women in the Senior school, they all belong to the Fabian Society and are pacifists. That's the sort of thing Mr. Lowther, Mr. Lloyd and myself are up against when we are not up against the narrow-minded, halfeducated crowd in the junior departments. Sandy, I'll swear you are short-sighted, the way you peer at people. You must get spectacles." "I'm hot," said Sandy irritably, "it only seems so." "It's unnerving," said Miss Brodie. "Do you know, Sandy dear, all my ambitions are for you and Rose. You have got insight, perhaps not quite spiritual, but you're a deep one, and Rose has got instinct, Rose has got instinct." "Perhaps not quite spiritual," said Sandy. "Yes," said Miss Brodie, "you're right. Rose has got a future by virtue of her instinct." "She has an instinct how to sit for her portrait," said Sandy. "That's what I mean by your insight," said Miss Brodie. "I ought to know, because my prime has brought me instinct and insight, both." Fully to savour her position, Sandy would go and stand outside St. Giles' Cathedral or the Tolbooth, and contemplate these emblems of a dark and terrible salvation which made the fires of the damned seem very merry to the imagination by contrast, and much preferable. Nobody in her life, at home or at school, had ever spoken of Calvinism except as a joke that had once been taken seriously. She did not at the time understand that her environment had not been on the surface peculiar to the place, as was the environment of the Edinburgh social classes just above or, even more, just below her own. She had no experience of social class at all. In its outward forms her fifteen years might have been spent in any suburb of any city in the British Isles; her school, with its alien house system, might have been in Ealing. All she was conscious of now was that some quality of life peculiar to Edinburgh and nowhere else had been going on unbeknown to her all the time, and however undesirable it might be she felt deprived of it; however undesirable, she desired to know what it was, and to cease to be protected from it by enlightened people. In fact, it was the religion of Calvin of which Sandy felt deprived, or rather a specified recognition of it. She desired this birthright; something definite to reject. It pervaded the place in proportion as it was unacknowledged. In some ways the most real and rooted people whom Sandy knew were Miss Gaunt and the Kerr sisters who made no evasions about their belief that God had planned for practically everybody before they were born a nasty surprise when they died. Later, when Sandy read John Calvin, she found that although popular conceptions of Calvinism were sometimes mistaken, in this particular there was no mistake, indeed it was but a mild understanding of the case, he having made it God's pleasure to implant in certain people an erroneous sense of joy and salvation, so that their surprise at the end might be the nastier. Sandy was unable to formulate these exciting propositions; nevertheless she experienced them in the air she breathed, she sensed them in the curiously defiant way