CHINA
FRIDAY SUPPLEMENT,
SHORT STORY
a strange one about a child in a girls' school, who tried to create an image of her father out of memory
SHE
HE looked at her book without really reading. She had brought the book with her into the Common Room, as a sort of *moral screen against the noisy prsonalities of the other children, who were running about, tripping each at over chairs, shouting other, quarrelling and laughing together independent of any par- ticular joke.
Elsa looked at them in her sad, vague way, and thought, "I shall never be young again." She was just fifteen.
It was only a little while ago that she had been sent here by the aunts. That formidable horde of old women who cling round long-established the skirts of
families had, in this case, awoken suddenly to the memory of Elsa's father, listed in wartime: "Miss- ing, since reported killed." Some- thing must be done for his daughter.
Elsa's mother had married the again and was living O Riviera with her second husband, an Italian near-gigolo, on whose broken-English, whining words she was for ever pathetically hanging, forgetful of her daugh- ter Elsa trailing after them.
ald
When the aunts, with their musty minds like a set of family albums, thought about it they agreed that "this was mo life for a young girl not yet to grown up." It was decided sent Elsa to a school on the South Coast.
as
*
*
The school, described in the prospectus
"a home from home," was made up of two large buildings joined together by a long tube-like covered passage.
Elsa, freed from the confusion of that maze-like following after
∙BY INEZ HOLDEN
her mother and stepfather, which had been her existence and which had already taken on, in her mind, the unreality of a dream, could not easily adapt herself to the life within the school. This was because she was always thinking, in her strange and sor- rowful way, of her father, search- ing far back into the past, try- ing to take strength enough from memory and imagination to create for herself a complete image.
Although it had been made known to her before her fourth birthday that she was not to see her father again, she had not- believed this.
Eisa thought that she had known her father rather as animal, a dog, might know a hu-
man; the pitch of his voice, the rhythm of his footsteps, the tex- ture of his clothes, and even a gentle strength of manner which belonged to him especially were with her still. These things could childish. be brought back from
in memories at will, but even imagination she could not hear him speaking, nor could she see It the expression of his face. escaped her, and when she tried in her mind to find it she seem- ed to be staring, instead, straight into the face of a watch.
This was her father's thick gold watch which still had so strong a life of its own, in Elsa's me- mories, that sometimes it blotted out everything else around
it.
Music
APRIL 22, 1938
Master
The watch, with its heavy black the Roman figures painted on face in an over-large exaggerat- ed way, as if it had been speci- ally made for some short-sighted time-slave, was like a shrill exist
be ing personality screaming to
seen.
In infancy she had stared at the Roman figures in her fixed and thoughtful way until her father, touching a hidden spring at the it side of the watch, had set chiming the hour and the quar- ters, a sound so delicate and ab- surd that it made the child think of a pin dancing on a glass table
One of the schoolgirls bump- ing her chair jolted her mind back into the present. She sigh- ed. What a lot of life had gone by since then: - Childhood had. crept along, so slowly for her, all these memories-belonged to 1917. She had been three years old then, and now in 1929 she was fifteen.
the
*
most
At tea-tim
home from me hour of the day, the children wore navy blue skirts, white silk blouses, and woollen home- any coloured chooen jerseys. The governesses, one at the head of each long wooden table, started samming, in conversational flight, over literature, art and politics, their carrying sópranos set going- something like small talk m cathedral town, which made the schoolgirls feel lost and more than ever isolated out of life.
Elsa, for ever searching in her
memory for the image of her father, was, in her extreme lone- liness, the least able to take any part in this conversational game. The others, wondering if “She knew a lot about life" because she had been to Biarritz, Paris, and the South of France and had seen restaurants, bars, and danc- ings, were sorry that she was. always so silent, they thought her a kind of thinking fool.
Elsa, don't crumble your bread hike that. A governess's voice, sinking suddenly down to a depressing drone, started Elsa so that she began regretting that there was no escape from school life.
She thought: "I can be as happy or unhappy as a grown-up person, and my mind is as much alive, and yet here I am impri- soned in this pretentious, women- made institution, compelled to concern myself with things which I know have no connection with any sort of life.
"Elsa, cut your bread-with your knife and then eat
erly.
ated hands
distant table the French
with her thin,
crumbling without seeming any worse for it.
isa, do not sulk, it does not suit you."
The governess's persistent tone of school supervision affected Elsa's ears again like the attack barrel organ. of an out-of-tune The child next to her began to giggle in an uncontrolled, high- pitched way.
DAS
"Elsa could not adapt her-
self to the life within the school
She thought,
shall never be young aga
who were
Itrest
the conversa started
gossiping talking
had suddenly gon married
Mooney, who be
It had been hoped that the de- parture of poor Miss Mooney, with her long, greasy hair and Harly afterno clothes, would til the -bring a rest from
end of the term, but now it was known in that
way in which news round in prisons, concentration camps
and
Iran
was coming to the schools to teach music.
Even his name
Herr Muller
was known to the children, who eager for the sight of a new face, began chattering together about his arrival:
"Fancy having a music master. and a German, too. We are get- ting advanced."
One of the day girls, who. boasted of being engaged to an aviator from the near by flying school, and was already con- sidered by the governesses to be "extremely bad
she had been
a Saturda
strange to
rzind
because
in
thin
the incompletely mem
own
father. It
able to recall the unimportant details of the face of any one loved, the coloured of (Continued on Page 7
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