The Back of Our Heads, Stephen Barr [good novels to read txt] 📗
- Author: Stephen Barr
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"She didn't break the window," Sarah said. "She was pushed against it by the policeman. And she never scratches unless a mosquito happens to—"
"You were not there, Stone," said the headmistress, "so how can you say that?"
"I know my mother. And she doesn't bite, either," Sarah said, looking at Miss Wakefield's neck. "Unless it's a tough old hen!"
Miss Wakefield had enough sense to refuse the bait, but she flushed. "I do not feel that it is at all suitable for the mother of one of our girls to be a Militant Suffragette! The reputation of the School...." The sentence was left unfinished.
She picked up the sheets of paper. "I have here two of the mid-term examination papers in arithmetic, yours and Angela Harvey's. There is a curious, a very curious similarity between them. All the answers are correct except for problems five, seven and twelve, and they have precisely the same mistakes in both papers!" She paused and stared hard at Sarah, who blinked but refused to lower her eyes. "You and Harvey sit next to one another," Miss Wakefield said meaningly.
Sarah said nothing. She sniffed because her nose was running and there was no pocket in her games uniform for a handkerchief.
"Well?" said Miss Wakefield. "Have you nothing to say?"
"No, Miss Wakefield," Sarah said, "except I didn't copy from Angela, if that's what you mean."
"Then it would appear that she copied from you."
"That's a beastly thing to say! It was a coincidence! She's not a cheat!"
The headmistress felt on secure ground: the child was losing her temper. It was Miss Wakefield's favorite stratagem to make people lose their tempers—that is, if they were children or underlings.
"Blow your nose, Stone," she said, and then, seeing that Sarah had no handkerchief, she gave her her own, with a look of distaste. "I think perhaps you might do better at some other school."
"So do I, Miss Wakefield," Sarah said. "Mother wanted to get me into Mr. Russell's school, but it was full up."
"Bertrand Russell?"
Sarah nodded, blowing her nose again. She was shivering.
"Well!" said Miss Wakefield. "I never heard the like! He's an Atheist! Why, he believes in Free Love!"
"I don't know what he believes," Sarah said. "I know he was awfully nice when he came to tea. He said I had some kind of a guiding somebody standing over me. He said he would like awfully to have me at his school, but it was full up. I know one of the boys there and he says it's simply ripping."
"Well! Of course, if your mother thinks of us as Second Best.... Perhaps Mr. Russell believes it is all right to cheat in examinations, but we have a Tradition at St. Agatha's." She rang a bell on her desk and a scrawny little housemaid came in. "Send one of the girls for Angela Harvey," Miss Wakefield said. "Tell her to come here directly." The little housemaid bobbed respectfully and went out. "Now we shall see what she has to say," the headmistress said.
"She'll only be frightened and cry," Sarah said, "and she'll say anything you want her to. She wouldn't dare cheat in an examination."
"Then you admit that you copied from her?"
"I do not!" Sarah said, her teeth chattering. "I tell you it was a fluke! Miss Somerville jolly well knows I wouldn't do it!" Miss Somerville was the new and still enthusiastic math teacher, but her enthusiasm would be gone by the end of the term, and so would Miss Somerville.
"That will do!" said the headmistress. "Impertinence will not improve matters."
There was a timid knock on the door and a girl of Sarah's age, but smaller, came in. She had changed into the school uniform and wore steel-rimmed spectacles.
"Stand beside Stone, Harvey," the headmistress said. "Now I want you to think very carefully before you answer what I'm going to ask you."
Angela Harvey looked terrified and began to cry.
"There, you see?" Sarah said. "You're only doing this because you don't like my mother! You want me to leave school, and it's the only excuse you can find!"
"Be quiet," Miss Wakefield said with an unpleasant smile. She never lost her temper. "Did you, or did you not," she went on to the damp Angela, "copy the answers in your arithmetic from Stone?"
"Oh, no! Oh, I wouldn't, Miss Wakefield!"
"Then how is it you have seventeen right answers? You never do as well as that, and you got the same three wrong that Stone did."
"I don't know, Miss Wakefield! I don't know!" Angela sobbed loudly and became smaller than ever.
"I'm afraid," said Miss Wakefield, who looked quite otherwise, "that unless your friend here can explain this curious—this odd coincidence by admitting she copied your answers, I shall have to ask your parents to remove you from St. Agatha's at once."
Sarah's face was bright red, but it had the look of fever. "How simply rotten of you! You're just trying to get me to confess to something I didn't do, to save Angela!"
The headmistress felt her heart beat with excitement and pleasure. Why, the child was positively crimson with temper! "You are not helping her by behaving like a common guttersnipe. At this school, we try to behave like ladies. Perhaps at Mr. Russell's—"
"At Mr. Russell's school," Sarah interrupted, "I'm sure nobody would think it was worthwhile to cheat."
"Then you admit you cheated?"
Sarah looked at Angela, and back at the headmistress. "Yes!"
Miss Wakefield smiled. "Well, then, I think there is nothing more to be said. You may go, Harvey."
"You," Sarah said, looking at Miss Wakefield with blazing fury, "are a coward and a—a black-mailer!"
Tiny cracks seemed to appear in the headmistress's porcelain composure. Angela had not yet left the room and heard Sarah's outburst. She stopped at the door and turned around with wide eyes.
"Go at once!" cried the headmistress to her, and waited until the door closed. "You are to be expelled publicly from the school!" she said to Sarah in a low, unsteady voice. "And first you will be publicly thrashed!"
Sarah's face was patchy now, red on white, and her skin looked dry as paper. "If you touch me, I will kill you. I'm not afraid of anyone like you. I didn't cheat in the exam. I said it to keep you from expelling Angela, and you knew it all the time. Everything you say is a lie. You just want to get rid of me because of my mother. You are against votes for women because you are a liar. You told us in history class about government by consent, but how can it be when half the population have nothing to say in the matter? I'm going to pack and leave, and if you try and stop me, I'll...."
She went fiery red, and then white, and fainted.
The headmistress was breathing hard, and later, when Sarah was taken to the san, she was frightened. Sarah's temperature was 107 and she had the most virulent kind of pneumonia the school doctor had yet come across. He was almost more curious in watching the course of the disease than he was concerned with the patient, but he did not have very long to watch it, for Sarah died shortly before sunrise.
Q As far as one can follow your line of reasoning, you claim that the head woman of your school was untruthful, but was against untruth.
A. Yes. Quite a lot of them are.
Q. They sound mad.
A. Well, they are and they aren't. They lie to themselves, mainly; that's what causes most of the trouble. They have a saying: Know Thyself, but nobody ever—
Q. They have? Who said it?
A. All sorts of people are said to be the ones who said it first, but actually I think I was. I was living on an island in the Aegean Sea, and the mainland Greeks thought women shouldn't be writing poetry, so there was a row about it. They said I invented hexameters—which was nonsense—and that made them angry for some reason. So, later on, they decided I was a myth.
Q. Is this the Sappho you mentioned earlier in this hearing?
A. No, no. She was later and she didn't become a myth. My name was Phemonoë. I meant to tell you about that trip. My father was—
Q. Never mind. We've heard enough of the early trips. What we should like to hear about is your last. A decision must be made about these people—we've waited long enough. While it must be admitted that you are the best we have for the task, you not only take a long time and make error after error, but in the very process of examining them, you alter the subject of examination.
A. Yes, I know. They have a new phrase for that. They call it the Uncertainty Principle. For example, you can't determine the mass and velocity of a particle and at the same time its position. If you measure the one, you alter the other.
Q. We are quite aware of that.
A. I just thought I'd remind you.
Q. Unnecessary.
A. That's what men usually say; they dislike being reminded. Am I to stop making trips?
Q. That will be decided in the light of the rest of your report. I may tell you now that there will probably be no further trips. You will be reabsorbed into the Unity.
A. I see. I remember you said the same thing after I reported on the time they hanged Haman. You seemed to side with him. Anyway, if I get reabsorbed, it won't be a Unity any more—not the way things are going.
Q. You overrate yourself. Contact with Mankind has changed you.
A. Oh, it has! I've changed them a bit, but it's the principle of uncertainty again: it changes me, too.
Q. The Unity is greater than its parts.
A. Not if it's infinite, the way you say it is. You know, it's a funny thing, but I've never been quite clear just what's behind all this decision you talk about. What is our purpose?
Q. Does a stone have a purpose when it falls?
A. I'm not talking about values. What are the alternatives you imply in the decision?
Q. There are three. We destroy them; we absorb them; we ignore them.
A. I'm afraid they can't be ignored.
Q. Why not?
A. It's too late. The Unity should have started ignoring them right at the beginning—we are already changed. And if they are absorbed, we shall be still more changed.
Q. They will be changed. The Unity is eternal and—
A. You ought to talk to a man called Heisenberg. He called it the inexactitude principle, but it's the same thing. For example, men are always going around asking each other questions; they call it taking a poll, only when you try to find out that way what people are thinking, you change them. Or anthropology—when you study a tribe, you alter its way of life. Furthermore, it alters yours.
Q. It would appear that you have lost your sense of objectivity.
A. That's the way my last husband talks. There is no such thing. It's a strange fact, but it seems that the mathematicians are the only ones who have a glimmering of the truth—they and the physicists. I was beginning to think that mankind as a whole was progressing quite nicely.
Q. I thought you said they were. It seems you're never satisfied.
A. Well, some things improve, but their point of view keeps changing with regard to what should and what should not improve. It's hard to say whether the Greeks really believed in progress: they thought there had been a golden age and that the world had degenerated from it. Some of them may have wanted to return to it, but I always suspected their motives—by their own showing, they were decadent. During the Middle Ages, it was felt that art was on the way up—part of an evolutionary process—whereas science was not. Aristotle and the Thomists had science all cut and dried. Nowadays it's fashionable to say the art was as "good" in primitive times as it is now, while science on the other hand is evolving to a higher state of truth. The latter happens to be true, but they still have war.
Q. Perhaps it's inevitable.
A. If it is, we are wasting our time.
Q. That is for the Unity to decide. You set yourself up as Mankind's conscience.
A. Not conscience. I plead for self-examination—for a reappraisal of ideas.
Q. Yet you only succeed in irritating them.
A. That may be the best way. And you confuse conscience with consciousness. If there's one thing I've found out,
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