Ivy Compton-Burnett - Dolores

“Sigismund, I will read the play to myself.”

Claverhouse nodded, as though half-gratified; and going from the room, returned with the manuscript. He set it by his mother, after holding it closely to his eyes, to ensure his placing it the right way up before her; and left her without a word. In the narrow little hall he came to a pause, and pushed his fingers through his hair, as though he were schooling himself for a task that was distasteful. After a moment he made his way to his attic study, to await the pupils whose teaching was the trial of his days, and the means of his sustenance through them. The room seemed to fit its owner. It was bare of board, and of sparse furnishing; disorderly and paper — scattered. The table was hacked and scored; a pile of used quill pens flanked a broken inkstand; a smaller table, clearly profaned by any touch but his own, was littered with crumpled papers and grey with dust. He seated himself at the larger table, and drew towards him a pile of papers, scored and overwritten in his own hand. Till late in the afternoon, with the respite of an hour for food, he laboured at his irksome toil. His pupils came and went — strong — limbed striplings, rejoicing in their youth, ignorant or heedless of their contact with genius, ready to hail any carelessness of duty as a pedagogic favour. He laboured with a simple conscientiousness; recognising the prostitution of his powers, and giving of them fully. When the last had left him, he rose and stretched his limbs; and then went at once to a wooden cabinet, and drew out a pile of manuscript. He held it for a long moment, almost dandling it in his arms; and then replaced it with a lingering touch. “Ah!” he muttered. “There is another now.”

He broke off, seated himself on the table, and drew towards him paper and pens. Half an hour later a limping step came softly to the door, and was silent.

In the living again of the early time of after years, Dolores was to see in her student days the things of the student’s life as strangely least amongst many. There seemed from the first to be strange, bright promise in this being to face and in touch with the one, whom her young reverence had placed apart from the world, in the sphere which youth creates for those it sees the world’s great. Hence, underlying her visible lot, was a hidden thing to which other things grew to be nothing. In secret she watched the self-absorbed being, that seemed to think and move in regard of none, and when perplexity’s edge was blunt, of none regarded. In secret her hours were given to the dramas, which had fed her early eagerness for knowledge of her kind; and, grasped by her mind as given by his own, they seemed to bring her soul and his into subtle mutual knowledge. She spoke no word of this current of her life which was deeper than that which carried her fellows; sensitive to shame upon feelings she could only connect with her earlier self by yielding that self to their force; and in light discussion of the playwright, yielded her part to the lightness, drawing over what she sanctified the closest veil.

With the opening of the last and lived-in year of this life which to others was passionless, the student-experience of reaching the fulness of student days, and facing their wane, was robbed of its heed by the knowledge of near communion with the creature first to her judging. The strait routine continued to give of what seemed so foreign to itself. It was at the first hearing of a lecture from his lips, that there came the first awakening to the hidden truth.

She took long to forget what her pale calmness hid, as its minutes passed and its words fell. It was not that the words were as those she had looked for: there was little that strained the feelings or powers of those who listened. There was nothing but an academic dealing with the drama prescribed, with holding to the hearers’ needs, and checking of instinct to rise or probe beyond their following. But poor Dolores! There was little need of what her fancy had painted, for the begetting of tumult within her. As surely as this would have brought it, it was born of what was afforded. This simple doing of a common thing by the man of genius, this expending of the greatly-achieving energy on the unhonoured service, given for sustenance — it was an awakening of deeper heart-throbs. That month was a dream, bound up with the real by the struggle with the lassitude of mind, which came of the long emotional strain; and at its end, no word had passed between the teacher and the pupil who would have given this worth to a word.

But there was difference in the months that followed. The classic drama was held a subject calling for some individual teaching; and there came a moment when she stood, with limbs that trembled, at the door behind which he awaited her alone. The essay whose judgment was to fill his hour of duty to her, passed from her hand to his, with a faltering of the one and a casual grasp of the other, which showed her herself as she was in his sight — one in an insignificant many. His dealing with it struck no note — as she had had a formless fear that it might — discordant with her conception of him. He propped his face in his hands with his eyes almost touching its pages; read them from the first to the last without diversion of glance; and then accomplished his task with as great a despatch as permitted its doing; limiting critical words to the parts that needed them, and showing what offended by drawing his pen through the passage. When he gathered up the papers at the end, he stayed his hand, and turned them as if he had found them not as their kind. Then putting them into her hands, without encountering her eyes, he pushed back his chair from the desk, and seemed to sink into musing. The lessons passed thus for weeks, even to the doubt at the end. At last, urged by the thought of their lessening number, she embodied in her essay a passage that showed a knowledge of his dramas. It was not an actual quotation or eulogy; for her instinct guarded her from stumbling — simply some words which implied a reading of his latest play. She saw his eyes arrested by the passage; and felt rather than saw, his glance at herself; but he spoke no word. Her sense of repulsion revealed in its pain how much the action had held of purpose; and she summoned her strength, and faced the following meeting with no emotion free. As she entered the room, his eyes went to her face.

“You read my plays?” he said.

“Yes,” said Dolores, feeling no power of further utterance.

“Ah! that is well,” he said, looking into her face with a peering gaze, that seemed to be straining to grasp what it held. Then, turning to her papers, he added in his harsher tones, “Well, for your own sake;” and gave himself to his task.

No further word, apart from their formal dealings, was said till the close of the term. As he gave her her papers for the last time, he fixed his eyes on hers in a manner to hold her in waiting for speech. When they had stood for some moments, he spoke in quick, deep tones.

“How about some lessons with me on my own plays?”

Dolores never recalled her answer. The memory she summoned was of his turning away with the words, “Ah, well, well; we shall see to it.”

Coming upon him in the cloisters early in the following term, and passing him, believing she was not perceived, she was startled at a distance by his voice.

“Five o’clock will do,” he called, as though some discussion of the hour had passed. “Five o’clock on Fridays. We begin this evening.”

From that day Dolores knew the great man as a teacher, and was dealt with by him as a pupil. He laid aside the conventional mask he wore with women; and showed her himself, sparing her nothing of the brunt of his moods. At times he was full of forbearance and kindliness, in control of his nervous temper, and delighted to gratitude by the insight into his aims, which her early study and the affinity of their minds had given; at others, intolerant of the faintest faltering of grasp; and at others, in a mood of cynical bitterness to the world that ignored his service, which held her in heavy constraint, in its grudging of sign that exception was made of herself. He accepted no gratitude for the service he rendered; and presumed in no way upon it unless in assumption of a right to guide. It was not in chief his own plays that he taught, but, as he told her in a moment of emotion, “the greatest thing that life offered to men”—the study of men, as shown in nature, and, as grasped from nature, in the plays of the greater dramatists of different time and race; in whom, with a natural dignity which thrilled her to passion, he numbered himself: and at times he demanded not only understanding of these, but studies of character from her own pen.