Encounters: stories Read Free

of that delightful solitude. The silver birch tree that distinguished their front garden slanted beckoning her across the pavement. She hesitated, as her gate swung open, and stood looking up and down the road. She was sorry to go in, but could not resist the invitation of the empty house. She wondered if tomorrow would fill her with so strange a stirring as to-day. Soon, in a few months, it would be summer and there would be nothing more to come. Summer would be beautiful, but this spring made promise of a greater beauty than summer could fulfil; hinted at a mystery which other summers had evaded rather than explained. She went slowly up the steps, fumbling for her latch-key.

    The day's dinner still hung dank and heavy in the air of the little hall. She stood in the doorway, with that square of light and sound behind her, craving the protection and the comfort with which that dark entrance had so often received her. There was a sudden desolation in the emptiness of the house.
    Quickly she entered the sitting-room and flung open the window, which set the muslin curtains swaying in the breeze and clanked the little pictures on the walls. The window embrasure was so deep that there was little light in the corners of the room; armchairs and cabinets were lurking in the dusk. The square of daylight by the window was blocked by a bamboo table groaning under an array of photographs. In her sweeping mood she deposed the photographs, thrust the table to one side, and pulled her chair up into the wmdow."I can't correct my essays in the dark,"she asserted, though she had done so every evening of the year.
    "How tight-laced you are, poor Columbines,"she said, throwing away the paper and seeing how the bass cut deep into the i8

    fleshy stems."You were brave above it all, but—there now!"She cut the bass and shook the flowers out into a vase."I can't correct,"she sighed,"with you all watching me. You are so terribly flippant!"
    But what a curious coincidence: she had set her class to write an essay upon Daffodils!"You shall judge; I'll read them all out loud. They will amuse you."She dipped her pen in the red-ink pot with an anticipatory titter.
    With a creak of wheels a young woman went by slowly, wheeling a perambulator. She leant heavily on the handle-bar, tilting the perambulator on its two back wheels, and staring up, wide-mouthed, at the windows.
    "How nice to be so much interested,"thought Miss Murcheson, pressing open the first exercise-book."But I'm sure it can't be a good thing for the baby."
    The essays lacked originality. Each paragraph sidled up self-consciously to openings for a suitable quotation, to rush each one through with a gasp of triumph.
    "And then my heart with pleasure fills And dances with the daffodils."

    "Fair daffodils, we weep to see You fade away so soon."
    She wondered if any of her class could weep for the departure of a daffodil. Mostly they had disclaimed responsibility for such weakness by the stern prefix,"As the poet says."Flora Hopwood had, she remembered, introduced a "Quotation Dictionary,"which must have been the round of her circle.
    "I must forbid it. Why can't they see things for themselves, think them out? I don't believe they ever really see anything, just accept things on the authority of other people. I could make them believe anything.
    What a responsibility teaching is But
    is it? They'd believe me, but they wouldn't care. It wouldn't matter, really.
    "They're so horribly used to things. Nothing ever comes new to them that they haven't grown up with. They get their very feelings out of books. Nothing ever surprises or impresses them. When spring comes they get preoccupied, stare dreamily out of the windows. They're thinking out their new

    hats. Oh, if only I didn't know them quite so well, or knew them a little better!
    "If I had a school of my own,"she meditated, running her eyes down the pages and mechanically underlining spelling-mistakes,"I would make them think. I'd horrify them,