George Orwell - Collected Works

§III

During the next few weeks there were two things that occupied Dorothy to the exclusion of all others. One, getting her class into some kind of order; the other, establishing a concordat with Mrs. Creevy.

The second of the two was by a great deal the more difficult. Mrs. Creevy’s house was as vile a house to live in as one could possibly imagine. It was always more or less cold, there was not a comfortable chair in it from top to bottom, and the food was disgusting. Teaching is harder work than it looks, and a teacher needs good food to keep him going. It was horribly dispiriting to have to work on a diet of tasteless mutton stews, damp boiled potatoes full of little black eyeholes, watery rice puddings, bread and scrape and weak tea—and never enough even of these. Mrs. Creevy, who was mean enough to take a pleasure in skimping even her own food, ate much the same meals as Dorothy, but she always had the lion’s share of them. Every morning at breakfast the two fried eggs were sliced up and unequally partitioned, and the dish of marmalade remained for ever sacrosanct. Dorothy grew hungrier and hungrier as the term went on. On the two evenings a week when she managed to get out of doors she dipped into her dwindling store of money and bought slabs of plain chocolate, which she ate in the deepest secrecy—for Mrs. Creevy, though she starved Dorothy more or less intentionally, would have been mortally offended if she had known that she bought food for herself.

The worst thing about Dorothy’s position was that she had no privacy and very little time that she could call her own. Once school was over for the day her only refuge was the “morning-room,” where she was under Mrs. Creevy’s eye, and Mrs. Creevy’s leading idea was that Dorothy must never be left in peace for ten minutes together. She had taken it into her head, or pretended to do so, that Dorothy was an idle person who needed keeping up to the mark. And so it was always, “Well, Miss Millborough, you don’t seem to have very much to do this evening, do you? Aren’t there some exercise books that want correcting? Or why don’t you get your needle and do a bit of sewing? I’m sure I couldn’t bear to just sit in my chair doing nothing like you do!” She was for ever finding household jobs for Dorothy to do, even making her scrub the schoolroom floor on Saturday mornings when the girls did not come to school; but this was done out of pure ill nature, for she did not trust Dorothy to do the work properly, and generally did it again after her. One evening Dorothy was unwise enough to bring back a novel from the public library. Mrs. Creevy flared up at the very sight of it. “Well, really, Miss Millborough! I shouldn’t have thought you’d have had time to read !” she said bitterly. She herself had never read a book right through in her life, and was proud of it.

Moreover, even when Dorothy was not actually under her eye, Mrs. Creevy had ways of making her presence felt. She was for ever prowling in the neighbourhood of the schoolroom, so that Dorothy never felt quite safe from her intrusion; and when she thought there was too much noise she would suddenly rap on the wall with her broom handle in a way that made the children jump and put them off their work. At all hours of the day she was restlessly, noisily active. When she was not cooking meals she was banging about with broom and dustpan, or harrying the charwoman, or pouncing down upon the schoolroom to “have a look round” in hopes of catching Dorothy or the children up to mischief, or “doing a bit of gardening”—that is, mutilating with a pair of shears the unhappy little shrubs that grew amid wastes of gravel in the back garden. On only two evenings a week was Dorothy free of her, and that was when Mrs. Creevy sallied forth on forays which she called “going after the girls”; that is to say, canvassing likely parents. These evenings Dorothy usually spent in the public library, for when Mrs. Creevy was not at home she expected Dorothy to keep out of the house, to save fire and gaslight. On other evenings Mrs. Creevy was busy writing dunning letters to the parents, or letters to the editor of the local paper, haggling over the price of a dozen advertisements, or poking about in the girls’ desks to see that their exercise books had been properly corrected, or “doing a bit of sewing.” Whenever occupation failed her for even five minutes she got out her workbox and “did a bit of sewing”—generally restitching some bloomers of harsh white linen of which she had pairs beyond number. They were the most chilly-looking garments that one could possibly imagine; they seemed to carry upon them, as no nun’s coif or anchorite’s hair shirt could ever have done, the impress of a frozen and awful chastity. The sight of them set you wondering about the late Mr. Creevy, even to the point of wondering whether he had ever existed.

Looking with an outsider’s eye at Mrs. Creevy’s manner of life, you would have said that she had no pleasures whatever. She never did any of the things that ordinary people do to amuse themselves—never went to the pictures, never looked at a book, never ate sweets, never cooked a special dish for dinner or dressed herself in any kind of finery. Social life meant absolutely nothing to her. She had no friends, was probably incapable of imagining such a thing as friendship, and hardly ever exchanged a word with a fellow-being except on business. Of religious belief she had not the smallest vestige. Her attitude towards religion, though she went to the Baptist Chapel every Sunday to impress the parents with her piety, was a mean anticlericalism founded on the notion that the clergy are “only after your money.” She seemed a creature utterly joyless, utterly submerged by the dullness of her existence. But in reality it was not so. There were several things from which she derived acute and inexhaustible pleasure.

For instance, there was her avarice over money. It was the leading interest of her life. There are two kinds of avaricious person—the bold, grasping type who will ruin you if he can, but who never looks twice at twopence, and the petty miser who has not the enterprise actually to make money, but who will always, as the saying goes, take a farthing from a dunghill with his teeth. Mrs. Creevy belonged to the second type. By ceaseless canvassing and impudent bluff she had worked her school up to twenty-one pupils, but she would never get it much further, because she was too mean to spend money on the necessary equipment and to pay proper wages to her assistant. The fees the girls paid, or didn’t pay, were five guineas a term with certain extras, so that, starve and sweat her assistant as she might, she could hardly hope to make more than a hundred and fifty pounds a year clear profit. But she was fairly satisfied with that. It meant more to her to save sixpence than to earn a pound. So long as she could think of a way of docking Dorothy’s dinner of another potato, or getting her exercise books a halfpenny a dozen cheaper, or shoving an unauthorised half guinea on to one of the “good payers’ ” bills, she was happy after her fashion.

And again, in pure, purposeless malignity—in petty acts of spite, even when there was nothing to be gained by them—she had a hobby of which she never wearied. She was one of those people who experience a kind of spiritual orgasm when they manage to do somebody else a bad turn. Her feud with Mr. Boulger next door—a one-sided affair, really, for poor Mr. Boulger was not up to Mrs. Creevy’s fighting weight—was conducted ruthlessly, with no quarter given or expected. So keen was Mrs. Creevy’s pleasure in scoring off Mr. Boulger that she was even willing to spend money on it occasionally. A year ago Mr. Boulger had written to the landlord (each of them was for ever writing to the landlord, complaining about the other’s behaviour) to say that Mrs. Creevy’s kitchen chimney smoked into his back windows, and would she please have it heightened two feet. The very day the landlord’s letter reached her, Mrs. Creevy called in the bricklayers and had the chimney lowered two feet. It cost her thirty shillings, but it was worth it. After that there had been the long guerrilla campaign of throwing things over the garden wall during the night, and Mrs. Creevy had finally won with a dustbinful of wet ashes thrown on to Mr. Boulger’s bed of tulips. As it happened, Mrs. Creevy won a neat and bloodless victory soon after Dorothy’s arrival. Discovering by chance that the roots of Mr. Boulger’s plum tree had grown under the wall into her own garden, she promptly injected a whole tin of weed-killer into them and killed the tree. This was remarkable as being the only occasion when Dorothy ever heard Mrs. Creevy laugh.