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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Miss Pym Disposes," Josephine Tey masterfully combines intricate psychological characterization with a classic detective narrative, exploring the complexities of human nature within the confines of a women's physical education college. The novel is set against the backdrop of post-World War II England, where the austere and competitive atmosphere of academia intersects with themes of jealousy, ambition, and moral ambiguity. Tey's prose is polished and evocative, showcasing her keen wit and rich understanding of interpersonal dynamics, as she unfolds a murder mystery that is as much about the unraveling of societal norms as it is about crime itself. Josephine Tey, whose real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh, was a Scottish author striving to redefine the mystery genre, moving away from formulaic approaches and instead emphasizing psychological depth and character-driven storytelling. Her experiences in theatre and her keen observations of human behavior undoubtedly influenced her creation of complex female protagonists, as seen in Miss Pym, a psychology lecturer whose keen insights become pivotal in deciphering the truth amidst the chaos of suspicion and rivalry. This novel is a compelling read for lovers of literary mysteries and psychological fiction alike. Tey's dexterous narrative technique invites readers to contemplate the darker aspects of human relationships, making it an essential addition to any avid reader's collection. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Miss Pym Disposes
Table of Contents
Introduction
In the ordered world of a women’s training college, where loyalty, competition, and ideals collide, Lucy Pym’s gift for reading motives becomes both compass and burden, pressing her to weigh the ethics of intervening in other people’s futures against the cost of keeping silent, and to discover how a single judgment—however well meant—can ripple through a close-knit community and unsettle the delicate balance between justice, kindness, and ambition.
First published in 1946, Miss Pym Disposes is a mystery novel by Scottish author Josephine Tey, set within the intense, self-contained environment of an English women’s physical training college. Emerging at the end of the Golden Age of detective fiction, the book blends the classic closed-circle setup with a modern interest in psychology and motive. Tey’s focus is less on procedural sleuthing than on character and conscience, crafting a campus-based narrative whose constraints heighten both intimacy and tension. The result is a story poised between tradition and innovation, attentive to human behavior as much as to the machinery of crime.
At the center is Lucy Pym, a former schoolmistress whose popular book on psychology brings her an invitation to lecture at the college. What begins as a short visit stretches into an extended stay as she becomes intrigued by the students’ discipline, camaraderie, and rivalries, and by the principal’s relentless standards. With end-of-term examinations approaching, the stakes for the young women are high, and Pym’s keen observations gradually reveal the pressures beneath the polished routines. The narrative offers a quiet, wry voice that turns steadily inward, transforming everyday incidents into clues to temperament, motive, and choice.
Tey frames the novel as a study of responsibility: what does a perceptive outsider owe to a community that has welcomed her, and when does help become interference? The title hints at judgment and consequence, inviting readers to consider how outcomes are shaped not only by evidence but by the values we bring to it. Equally central are loyalty and fairness—how to reward merit without overlooking character, and how ambition can narrow the moral field. The book probes the gray zones between intuition and proof, kindness and complicity, and asks what it means to act justly in imperfect circumstances.
Stylistically, the novel is spare, exact, and slyly affectionate toward its setting. Tey attends to the physical rigor of training—the drills, demonstrations, and examinations—using movement and discipline as motifs for the shaping of character. The pace is measured rather than breathless, and the suspense grows from observation: a look held too long, a gesture repeated, a small courtesy withheld. The closed campus functions like a laboratory, clarifying pressures and testing loyalties. Without ostentation, Tey lets mood thicken from light satire to moral unease, so that the reader feels the tightening circle before fully grasping the implications of what is being weighed.
For contemporary readers, the book’s questions around expertise and authority feel timely. Pym’s status as a popular interpreter of psychology raises issues that resonate today: how confidently should we apply psychological insight to other people’s lives, and what happens when influence exceeds certainty? The novel also explores the costs of high-stakes competition in educational settings, the ethics of mentorship, and the complexities of women’s professional training. Its examination of group dynamics—cliques, favorites, and the subtle economies of praise—mirrors current conversations about merit, equity, and care in institutions charged with shaping futures.
Miss Pym Disposes offers the satisfying containment of a classic campus mystery and the reflective depth of a psychological study. It promises readers an experience that is quietly absorbing rather than sensational, marked by wit, moral tension, and a steadily sharpening focus on the consequences of choice. Those who appreciate character-driven suspense, elegant prose, and the slow turn of the screw will find much to admire. This is a novel to read for the pleasure of insight as much as for its puzzle, attentive to how we judge, how we help, and how we live with what we know.
Synopsis
Miss Pym Disposes follows Lucy Pym, a former schoolteacher whose popular book on psychology has made her an unexpected celebrity. Invited to speak at an English women’s physical training college, she plans a brief visit but is charmed by the close-knit community and its energetic routines. The setting is an ordered world of discipline, drill, and high ideals, presided over by a firm principal and dedicated staff. Lucy, an acute observer, brings a curious yet respectful eye to the rhythms of college life. What begins as a courtesy call becomes an extended stay, placing her quietly at the story’s center.
As Lucy lingers, she sees the students near the end of their rigorous final year. They practice teaching, perfect gymnastics sequences, and rehearse for the public Demonstration that will display the school’s standards to visitors and potential employers. The atmosphere is both collegial and competitive, governed by rules that insist on integrity as much as skill. Faculty expectations are exacting; success promises professional advancement in a field that prizes reliability. Lucy’s outsider status allows her to notice small details of temperament and habit, and her background in human behavior encourages her to weigh what she sees against her own untested theories.
Within the senior class, contrasting personalities emerge. Some students are steady and dutiful, others brilliant but sharp-edged, and a few self-consciously charming. Friendships and rivalries crisscross dormitories and practice halls, revealing quiet loyalties and hidden strains. A cosmopolitan student speaks with disarming candor; a shy classmate shows unexpected resilience; a widely admired leader reveals how pressure can shape conduct. Lucy’s conversations range from light banter to serious talk about vocation and character. The college’s traditions and rituals, from early drills to mealtime camaraderie, frame these portraits. Lucy increasingly senses that character, more than aptitude, may decide who prospers beyond graduation.
A coveted appointment becomes the year’s prize: a post that could launch a notable career. The process for choosing its recipient, while formal, invites strong opinions among students and faculty. Lucy is drawn into this delicate matter when her reputation for psychological insight makes her a convenient confidante. She is asked for impressions, and in weighing fitness for responsibility, she forms a view that favors one candidate over another. Though she recognizes the limits of her evidence, she believes sound judgment can prevent future harm. This decision point tightens the novel’s focus, aligning Lucy’s private scruples with the school’s public standards.
Lucy discreetly shares her conclusion with authority, intending to protect the profession’s values. The repercussions are immediate, if largely unspoken: expectations shift, friendships cool, and tensions grow beneath the surface courtesy of college life. Rehearsals for the Demonstration proceed with disciplined precision, but nerves show at the margins. The candidates for the appointment behave with careful decorum, while small gestures hint at disappointment or relief. Lucy realizes her intervention has altered a balance she barely understood. As the event approaches, the narrative’s pace quickens, binding professional testing, personal hopes, and the fragile equilibrium of a tightly regulated community.
On the day of the Demonstration and final assessments, the school performs for an exacting audience. Routines unfold in polished sequences, but a serious mishap breaks the pattern, stunning onlookers and shaking the college’s confidence. What might be accident or mischance appears, on closer inspection, to invite question. Procedures are reviewed, and quiet inquiries begin. The campus, once a haven of routine, feels suddenly precarious. Lucy’s earlier observations of temperament, rivalry, and stress return to her with new weight. She begins to wonder whether judgment, opportunity, and pressure might intersect in ways that explain the event without immediately naming a culprit.
The aftermath exposes subtle shifts in behavior: an alibi offered too quickly, a silence that lasts a moment too long, a kindness that might be strategy. Faculty handle matters privately to protect reputations and the school’s standing. Lucy, sifting her impressions, reconstructs movements and motives through the lens of ordinary psychology rather than forensic certainty. Chains of small decisions come into view. The novel keeps its inquiry contained, avoiding sensationalism in favor of gradual illumination. Lucy’s suspicions coalesce around possibility rather than proof. She understands that to speak now is to convert interpretation into consequence, with outcomes she cannot entirely predict.
Lucy faces a moral problem that outstrips the tidy clarity of her bestselling theories. If she advances her inference, she may derail a future and brand someone irrevocably, yet silence could leave a wrong unaddressed. The college’s emphasis on discipline and honor complicates the choice: justice must be served, but on what basis and at what cost. Her earlier intervention over the appointment weighs on her; she sees how a well-meaning nudge can remake a life. The narrative here turns on ethics rather than detection, asking whether understanding character confers the right to dispose of another person’s prospects.
The resolution arrives in understated fashion, consistent with the book’s controlled tone. Without leaning on sensational revelation, the conclusion underscores consequence: actions taken in good faith may carry burdens no argument can lighten. The college restores its outward order, but experience has salted its certainties, and Lucy must reckon with the reach of her influence. Miss Pym Disposes finally conveys the precarious balance between judgment and compassion, and the limits of psychological insight when set against lived complexity. It affirms that choices made in tight-knit communities reverberate widely, and that even restrained decisions can define reputations, futures, and the stories people must live with.
Historical Context
Miss Pym Disposes is set over a few summer weeks in the early 1940s at a women’s physical training college in England, a cloistered campus modeled on the specialist institutions that prepared female teachers in gymnastics, remedial exercise, and school games. The time frame sits in the shadow of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath, when austerity, rationing, and a disciplined public ethos shaped daily routines. Within this precise, rule-bound environment—dormitories, refectories, gymnasia, and lawns prepared for a public “Display Day”—etiquette, hierarchy, and practical training intersect. The insular setting reflects a national landscape where resources were scarce, professional placements were precious, and institutions prized order, stamina, and character as civic virtues.
The women’s physical education movement that began in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain supplies the novel’s institutional DNA. Swedish “Ling” gymnastics, devised by Pehr Henrik Ling (1776–1839), entered British schools through pioneers like Martina Bergman-Österberg, who opened her Hampstead college in 1885 and moved it to Dartford in 1895. Other centers followed—Anstey Physical Training College in Birmingham (founded in the late 1890s by Rhoda Anstey) and Bedford Physical Training College (1903, Margaret Stansfeld). Public “display days” showcased drill, apparatus, and rhythmic work to visiting dignitaries and employers. Miss Pym’s college mirrors these traditions exactly: the climactic Demonstration Day, the ethos of exactitude, and the students’ drilled unity are direct legacies of this movement.
Professionalization of physical training was driven by state syllabuses and associations that defined standards. The Board of Education’s Syllabus of Physical Training for Schools (1909) and its 1933 revision codified “free-standing” exercises, posture work, and graded progressions for girls and boys. The Ling Association (founded 1899) and later national bodies championed teacher certification, inspection, and in-service training. Colleges cultivated reputations through rigorous examinations, job placement rates, and the polished spectacle of end-of-year “dems.” The novel reproduces that credentialed culture: students’ futures hinge on mastery of set routines and on staff recommendations, while the fierce competition for a single coveted school post reflects a system where official standards and patronage intertwined.
The Second World War (1939–1945) reshaped British education and physical culture. Colleges and schools were evacuated; the Armed Forces expanded women’s roles through the ATS, WAAF, and WRNS; and physical training instructors proliferated across services and Civil Defence. War casualties spurred mass rehabilitation, while the Emergency Medical Service (1939) coordinated hospitals and convalescent units. Scarcity normalized discipline, early rising, drills, and collective duty. In Tey’s college, the regimentation of timetables, communal living, and stoic endurance echoes wartime norms. The students’ vocational urgency—securing a position, serving the nation’s schools, contributing to public health—mirrors a Britain where bodily fitness and morale were framed as patriotic responsibilities.
Parallel to education, remedial gymnastics and physiotherapy grew into a recognized medical field. The Society of Trained Masseuses (1894) gained a Royal Charter in 1920 (becoming the Chartered Society of Massage and Medical Gymnastics) and adopted the name Chartered Society of Physiotherapy in 1944. Swedish remedial exercise, massage, and orthopaedic techniques entered military hospitals and school clinics, notably at institutions like St Thomas’ Hospital’s training school in London. Physical training colleges embedded anatomy, corrective exercise, and posture analysis in syllabuses to meet clinical and school needs. The novel’s emphasis on anatomical precision, corrective routines, and the professional gravitas of “sound method” reflects this medicalization of movement and the expanding interface between classrooms and clinics.
The Education Act 1944 (the Butler Act) transformed schooling and teacher demand. Implemented from 1945, it created a tripartite secondary system (grammar, technical, secondary modern), formed the Ministry of Education (1944), and raised the school leaving age to 15 on 1 April 1947. Local Education Authorities expanded staffing, including specialist physical education posts, as PE became integral to a “balanced curriculum.” Wartime losses and postwar expansion produced acute teacher shortages but also fierce competition for high-status posts in selective schools. The novel’s central tension over a single appointment, the courting of references, and the political weight of a college principal’s endorsement capture how the Butler reforms turned staffroom decisions into life-changing gateways.
Austerity and rationing framed everyday life and institutional culture. Food rationing ran from 1940 to 1954; clothing coupons from 1941 to 1949; and the fuel crisis of the winter of 1946–47 chilled classrooms and halls. The government’s Utility schemes (from 1942) standardized plain, durable garments and furnishings. Such constraints reinforced frugality, uniformity, and a moral language of fairness. The college’s plain meals, simple kit, and emphasis on neatness and duty evoke this climate. Subtle class tensions among students—regional accents, fees, and prospects—play out within an officially leveling regime, mirroring a Britain where shared scarcity coexisted with persistent hierarchies in schooling and employment.
The book functions as a social critique by exposing how meritocratic ideals are compromised by institutional power, class prejudice, and expediency. It scrutinizes gatekeeping in teacher placement, where personal loyalties, reputation, and the optics of public Display Day can outweigh fairness or pastoral duty, echoing national anxieties about who deserved advancement in the 1940s reforms. The tightly controlled female body—drilled, assessed, and paraded—becomes a political symbol of the state’s claims on citizens in wartime and austerity. Through ethical dilemmas surrounding favoritism, sacrifice, and the costs of success, the novel interrogates a culture that prizes order and outcomes over care, dissent, and justice.
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1
A bell clanged. Brazen, insistent, maddening.
Through the quiet corridors came the din of it, making hideous the peace of the morning. From each of the yawning windows of the little quadrangle the noise poured out on to the still, sunlit garden where the grass was grey yet with dew.
Little Miss Pym stirred, opened one doubtful grey eye, and reached blindly for her watch. There was no watch. She opened the other eye. There seemed to be no bedside table either. No, of course not; now she remembered. There was no bedside table; as she had found last night. Her watch had had of necessity to be put under her pillow. She fumbled for it. Good heavens, what a row that bell was making! Obscene. There seemed to be no watch under the pillow. But it must be there! She lifted the pillow bodily, revealing only one small sheer-linen handkerchief in a saucy pattern of blue-and-white. She dropped the pillow and peered down between the bed and the wall. Yes, there was something that looked like a watch. By lying flat on her front and inserting an arm she could just reach it. Carefully she brought it up, lightly caught between the tips of first and second fingers. If she dropped it now she would have to get out of bed and crawl under for it. She turned on her back with a sigh of relief, holding the watch triumphantly above her.
Half-past five, said the watch.
Half-past five!
Miss Pym stopped breathing and stared in unbelieving fascination. No, really, did any college, however physical and hearty, begin the day at half-past five! Anything was possible, of course, in a community which had use for neither bedside tables nor bedside lamps, but-half-past five! She put the watch to her small pink ear. It ticked faithfully. She squinted round her pillow at the garden which was visible from the window behind her bed. Yes, it certainly was early; the world had that unmoving just-an-apparition look of early morning. Well, well!
Henrietta had said last night, standing large and majestical in the doorway: "Sleep well. The students enjoyed your lecture, my dear. I shall see you in the morning;" but had not seen fit to mention half-past-five bells.
Oh, well. It wasn't her funeral, thank goodness. Once upon a time she too had lived a life regulated by bells, but that was long ago. Nearly twenty years ago. When a bell rang in Miss Pym's life now it was because she had put a delicately varnished finger-tip on the bell-push. As the clamour died into a complaining whimper and then into silence, she turned over to face the wall, burrowing happily into her pillow. Not her funeral. Dew on the grass, and all that, was for youth: shining resplendent youth; and they could have it. She was having another two hours' sleep.
Very childlike she looked with her round pink face, her neat little button of a nose, and her brown hair rolled in flat invisible-pinned curls all over her head. They had cost her a spiritual struggle last night, those curls. She had been very tired after the train journey, and meeting Henrietta again, and the lecture; and her weaker self had pointed out that she would in all probability be leaving after lunch on the morrow, that her permanent wave was only two months old, and that her hair might very well be left unpinned for one night. But, partly to spite her weaker self with whom she waged a constant and bitter war, partly so that she might do Henrietta justice, she had seen to it that fourteen pins were pressed to their nightly duty. She was remembering her strong-mindedness now (it helped to cancel out any twinge of conscience about her self-indulgence this morning) and marvelling at the survival of that desire to live up to Henrietta. At school, she, the little fourth-form rabbit, had admired the sixth-form Henrietta extravagantly. Henrietta was the born Head Girl. Her talent lay exclusively in seeing that other people employed theirs. That was why, although she had left school to train in secretarial work, she was now Principal of a college of physical culture; a subject of which she knew nothing at all. She had forgotten all about Lucy Pym, just as Lucy had forgotten about her, until Miss Pym had written The Book.
That is how Lucy herself thought of it. The Book.[1q]
She was still a little surprised about The Book herself. Her mission in life had been to teach schoolgirls to speak French. But after four years of that her remaining parent had died, leaving her two hundred and fifty pounds a year, and Lucy had dried her eyes with one hand and given in her resignation with the other. The Headmistress had pointed out with envy and all uncharitableness that investments were variable things, and that two hundred and fifty didn't leave much margin for a civilised and cultured existence such as people in Lucy's position were expected to live. But Lucy had resigned all the same, and had taken a very civilised and cultured flat far enough from Camden Town to be nearly Regents Park. She provided the necessary margin by giving French lessons now and then when gas bills were imminent, and spent all her spare time reading books on psychology.
She read her first book on psychology out of curiosity, because it seemed to her an interesting sort of thing; and she read all the rest to see if they were just as silly. By the time she had read thirty-seven books on the subject, she had evolved ideas of her own on psychology; at variance, of course, with all thirty-seven volumes read to date. In fact, the thirty-seven volumes seemed to her so idiotic and made her so angry that she sat down there and then and wrote reams of refutal. Since one cannot talk about psychology in anything but jargon, there being no English for most of it, the reams of refutal read very learnedly indeed. Not that that would have impressed anyone if Miss Pym had not used the back of a discarded sheet (her typing was not very professional) on which to write:
Dear Mr Stallard,
I should be so grateful if you would not use your wireless after eleven at night. I find it so distracting.
Yours sincerelyLucy Pym.
Mr Stallard, whom she did not know (his name was on the card outside his door on the floor below) arrived in person that evening. He was holding her letter open in his hand, which seemed to Lucy very grim indeed, and she swallowed several times before she could make any coherent sound at all. But Mr Stallard wasn't angry about the wireless. He was a publishers' reader, it seemed, and was interested in what she had unconsciously sent him on the back of the paper.
Now in normal times a publisher would have rung for brandy at the mere suggestion of publishing a book on psychology. But the previous year the British public had shaken the publishing world by tiring suddenly of fiction, and developing an interest in abstruse subjects, such as the distance of Sirius from the earth, and the inward meaning of primitive dances in Bechuanaland. Publishers were falling over themselves, therefore, in their effort to supply this strange new thirst for knowledge, and Miss Pym found herself welcomed with open arms. That is to say, she was taken to lunch by the senior partner, and given an agreement to sign. This alone was a piece of luck, but Providence so ordained it that not only had the British public tired of fiction, but the intellectuals had tired of Freud and Company. They were longing for Some New Thing. And Lucy proved to be it. So Lucy woke one morning to find herself not only famous, but a best-seller. She was so shocked that she went out and had three cups of black coffee and sat in the Park looking straight in front of her for the rest of the morning.
She had been a best-seller for several months, and had become quite used to lecturing on "her subject" to learned societies, when Henrietta's letter had come; reminding her of their schooldays together and asking her to come and stay for a while and address the students. Lucy was a little wearied of addressing people, and the image of Henrietta had grown dim with the years. She was about to write a polite refusal, when she remembered the day on which the fourth form had discovered her christened name to be Laetitia; a shame that Lucy had spent her life concealing. The fourth form had excelled themselves, and Lucy had been wondering whether her mother would mind very much about her suicide, and deciding that anyhow she had brought it on herself by giving her daughter such a high-falutin name. And then Henrietta had waded into the humourists, literally and metaphorically. Her blistering comment had withered humour at the root, so that the word Laetitia had never been heard again, and Lucy had gone home and enjoyed jam roly-poly instead of throwing herself in the river. Lucy sat in her civilised and cultured living-room, and felt the old passionate gratitude to Henrietta run over her in waves. She wrote and said that she would be delighted to stay a night with Henrietta (her native caution was not entirely obliterated by her gratitude) and would with pleasure talk on psychology to her students.
The pleasure had been considerable, she thought, pushing up a hump of sheet to shut out the full brilliance of the daylight. Quite the nicest audience she had ever had. Rows of shining heads, making the bare lecture-room look like a garden. And good hearty applause. After weeks of the polite pattering of learned societies it was pleasant to hear the percussion of hollowed palm on hollowed palm. And their questions had been quite intelligent. Somehow, although psychology was a subject on their timetable, as shown in the common-room, she had not expected intellectual appreciation from young women who presumably spent their days doing things with their muscles. Only a few, of course, had asked questions; so there was still a chance that the rest were morons.
Oh well, tonight she would sleep in her own charming bed, and all this would seem like a dream. Henrietta had pressed her to stay for some days, and for a little she had toyed with the idea. But supper had shaken her. Beans and milk pudding seemed an uninspired sort of meal for a summer evening. Very sustaining and nourishing and all that, she didn't doubt. But not a meal one wanted to repeat. The staff table, Henrietta had said, always had the same food that the students had; and Lucy had hoped that that remark didn't mean that she had looked doubtfully upon the beans. She had tried to look very bright and pleased about the beans; but perhaps it hadn't been a success.
"Tommy! Tom-mee! Oh, Tommy, darling, waken up. I'm desperate!"
Miss Pym shot into wakefulness. The despairing cries seemed to be in her room. Then she realised that the second window of her room gave on to the courtyard; that the courtyard was small, and conversation from room to room through the gaping windows a natural method of communication. She lay trying to quiet her thumping heart, peering down over the folds of sheet to where, beyond the hump of her toes, the foreshortened oblong of the window framed a small piece of distant wall. But her bed lay in the angle of the room, one window to her right in the wall behind her, and the courtyard window to her left beyond the foot of her bed, and all that was visible from her pillow through the tall thin strip of brightness was half of an open window far down the courtyard.
"Tom-mee! Tom-mee!"
A dark head appeared in the window Miss Pym could see.
"For God's sake, someone," said the head, "throw something at Thomas and stop Dakers' row."
"Oh, Greengage, darling, you are an unsympathetic beast. I've bust my garter, and I don't know what to do. And Tommy took my only safety-pin[1] yesterday to pick the winkles with at Tuppence-ha'penny's party. She simply must let me have it back before—Tommy! Oh, Tommy!"
"Hey, shut up, will you," said a new voice, in a lowered tone, and there was a pause. A pause, Lucy felt, full of sign language.
"And what does all that semaphoring mean?" asked the dark head.
"Shut up, I tell you. She's there!" This in desperate sotto voce.
"Who is?"
"The Pym woman."
"What rubbish, darling,"—it was the Dakers voice again, high and unsubdued; the happy voice of a world's darling—"she's sleeping in the front of the house with the rest of the mighty. Do you think she would have a spare safety-pin if I was to ask her?"
"She looks zipp-fastener to me," a new voice said.
"Oh, will you be quiet! I tell you, she's in Bentley's room!"
There was a real silence this time. Lucy saw the dark head turn sharply towards her window.
"How do you know?" someone asked.
"Jolly told me last night when she was giving me late supper." Miss Joliffe was the housekeeper, Lucy remembered, and appreciated the nickname for so grim a piece of humanity.
"Gawd's truth!" said the "zipp-fastener" voice, with feeling.
Into the silence came a bell. The same urgent clamour that had wakened them. The dark head disappeared at the first sound of it, and Dakers' voice above the row could be heard wailing her desperation like a lost thing. Social gaffes were relegated to their proper unimportance, as the business of the day overwhelmed them. A great wave of sound rose up to meet the sound of the bell. Doors were banged, feet drummed in the corridor, voices called, someone remembered that Thomas was still asleep, and a tattoo was beaten on her locked door when objects flung at her from surrounding windows had failed to waken her, and then there was the sound of running feet on the gravel path that crossed the courtyard grass. And gradually there were more feet on the gravel and fewer on the stairs, and the babble of voices swelled to a climax and faded. When the noises had grown faint with distance or died into lecture-room silence, a single pair of feet pattered in flight across the gravel, a voice saying: "Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn—" at each footfall. The Thomas who slept, apparently.
Miss Pym felt sympathetic to the unknown Thomas. Bed was a charming place at any time, but if one was so sleepy that neither riotous bell-ringing nor the wails of a colleague made any impression, then getting up must be torture. Welsh, too, probably. All Thomases were Welsh. Celts hated getting up. Poor Thomas. Poor, poor Thomas. She would like to find poor Thomas a job where she would never have to get up before afternoon.
Sleep ran over her in waves, drawing her deeper and deeper under. She wondered if "looking zipp-fastener" was a compliment. Being a safety-pin person couldn't be thought exactly admirable, so perhaps—
She fell asleep.
2
She was being beaten with knouts[2] by two six-foot cossacks because she persisted in using the old-fashioned safety-pin when progress decreed a zipp-fastener[3], and the blood had begun to trickle down her back when she woke to the fact that the only thing that was being assaulted was her hearing. The bell was ringing again. She said something that was neither civilised nor cultured, and sat up. No, definitely, not a minute after lunch would she stay. There was a 2.41 from Larborough, and on that 2.41 she would be; her goodbyes said, her duty to friendship done, and her soul filled with the beatitude of escape. She would treat herself to a half-pound box of chocolates on the station platform as a sort of outward congratulation. It would show on the bathroom scales at the end of the week, but who cared?
The thought of the scales reminded her of the civilised and cultured necessity of having a bath. Henrietta had been sorry about its being so far to the staff bathrooms; she had been sorry altogether to put a guest into the student block, but Fröken Gustavsen's mother from Sweden was occupying the only staff guest-room, and was going to stay for some weeks until she had seen and criticised the result of her daughter's work when the annual Demonstration would take place at the beginning of the month. Lucy doubted very much whether her bump of locality—a hollow according to her friends—was good enough to take her back to that bathroom. It would be awful to go prowling along those bright empty corridors, arriving perhaps at lecture-rooms unawares. And still more awful to ask in a crowded corridor of up-since-dawners where one could perform one's belated ablutions.
Lucy's mind always worked like that. It wasn't sufficient for it to visualise one horror; it must visualise the opposite one too. She sat so long considering the rival horrors, and enjoying the sensation of doing nothing, that still another bell rang and still another wave of drumming feet and calling voices rose up and swamped the quiet of the morning. Lucy looked at her watch. It was half-past seven.
She had just decided to be uncivilised and uncultured and "go in her mook" as her daily woman called it—after all, what was this immersion in water but a modern fad, and if Charles the Second could afford to smell a little high, who was she, a mere commoner, to girn at missing a bath?—when there was a knock on her door. Rescue was at hand. Oh, joy, oh, glory, her marooned condition was at an end.
"Come in," she called in the glad tones of a Crusoe welcoming a landing party. Of course Henrietta would come to say good-morning. How silly of her not to have thought of that. She was still at heart the little rabbit who didn't expect Henrietta to bother about her. Really, she must cultivate a habit of mind more suitable to a Celebrity. Perhaps if she were to do her hair differently, or say over something twenty times a day after the manner of Coué—"Come in!"
But it was not Henrietta. It was a goddess.
A goddess with golden hair, a bright blue linen tunic, sea-blue eyes, and the most enviable pair of legs. Lucy always noticed other women's legs, her own being a sad disappointment to her.
"Oh, I'm sorry," said the goddess. "I forgot that you might not be up. In college we keep such odd hours."
Lucy thought that it was nice of this heavenly being to take the blame for her sloth.
"I do apologise for interrupting your dressing." The blue eye came to rest on a mule which was lying in the middle of the floor, and stayed there as if fascinated. It was a pale blue satin mule; very feminine, very thriftless, very feathery. A most undeniable piece of nonsense.
"I'm afraid it is rather silly," Lucy said.
"If you only knew, Miss Pym, what it is to see an object that is not strictly utilitarian!" And then, as if recalled to her business by the very temptation of straying from it: "My name is Nash. I'm the Head Senior. And I came to say that the Senior students would be very honoured if you would come to tea with them tomorrow. On Sundays we take our tea out into the garden. It is a Senior privilege. And it really is very pleasant out there on a summer afternoon, and we really are looking forward to having you." She smiled with eager benevolence on Miss Pym.
Lucy explained that she would not be there tomorrow; that she was departing this afternoon.
"Oh, no!" protested the Nash girl; and the genuine feeling in her tone caused Lucy a rush of warmth to the heart. "No, Miss Pym, you mustn't! You really mustn't. You have no idea what a god-send you are to us. It's so seldom that anyone—anyone interesting comes to stay. This place is rather like a convent. We are all so hard-worked that we have no time to think of an outside world; and this is the last term for us Seniors, and everything is very grim and claustrophobic—Final Exams, and the Demonstration, and being found posts, and what not—and we are all feeling like death, and our last scrap of sense of proportion is gone. And then you come, a piece of the outside, a civilised being—" She paused; half laughing, half serious. "You can't desert us."
"But you have an outside lecturer every Friday," Lucy pointed out. It was the first time in her life she had been a god-send to anyone, and she was determined to take the assertion with a grain of salt. She didn't at all like the gratified feeling that was sniffing round the edge of her emotions.
Miss Nash explained with clarity, point, and no small bitterness that the last three lecturers had been: an octogenarian on Assyrian inscriptions, a Czech on Central Europe, and a bonesetter on scoliosis.
"What is scoliosis?[2q]" asked Lucy.
"Curvature of the spine. And if you think that any of them brought sweetness and light into the College atmosphere, you are wrong. These lectures are supposed to keep us in touch with the world, but if I must be both frank and indiscreet"—she was obviously enjoying being both—"the frock you wore last night did us more good than all the lectures we have ever heard."
Lucy had spent a really shocking sum on that garment when first her book became a best-seller, and it still remained her favourite; she had worn it to impress Henrietta. The gratified feeling came a little nearer.
But not near enough to destroy her common sense. She could still remember the beans. And the lack of bedside lamps. And the lack of any bells to summon service. And the everlasting bells that rang to summon others. No, on the 2.41 from Larborough she would be, though every student of the Leys Physical Training College lay down in her path and wept aloud. She murmured something about engagements—leaving it to be inferred that her diary bulged with pressing and desirable appointments—and suggested that Miss Nash might, meanwhile, direct her to the Staff bathrooms. "I didn't want to go prowling through the corridors, and I couldn't find a bell to ring."
Miss Nash, having sympathised with her about the lack of service—"Eliza really should have remembered that there are no bells in the rooms here and come to call you; she's the Staff house-maid"—suggested that, if Miss Pym didn't mind using the students' baths, they were much nearer. "They are cubicles, of course; I mean, they have walls only part of the way; and the floor is a sort of greenish concrete where the Staff have turquoise mosaic with a tasteful design in dolphins, but the water is the same."
