Full book "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" by Muriel Sarah Spark on English!!! PART 2

[Dorothy Zbornak]

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Miss Brodie said, "So I intend simply to point out to Miss Mackay that there is a radical difference in our principles of education. Radical is a word pertaining to roots — Latin radix, a root. We differ at root, the headmistress and I, upon the question whether we are employed to educate the minds of girls or to intrude upon them. We have had this argument before, but Miss Mackay is not, I may say, an outstanding logician. A logician is one skilled in logic. Logic is the art of reasoning. What is logic, Rose?"

продолжение

"To do with reasoning, ma'am," said Rose, who later, while still in her teens, was to provoke Miss Brodie's amazement and then her awe and finally her abounding enthusiasm for the role which Rose then appeared to be enacting: that of a great lover, magnificently elevated above the ordinary run of lovers, above the moral laws, Venus incarnate, something set apart. In fact, Rose was not at the time in question engaged in the love affair which Miss Brodie thought she was, but it seemed so, and Rose was famous for sex. But in her mere eleventh year, on the winter's walk, Rose was taking note of the motor cars and Miss Brodie had not yet advanced far enough into her prime to speak of sex except by veiled allusion, as when she said of her warrior lover, "He was a pure man," or when she read from James Hogg's poem "Bonnie Kilmeny,"
Kilmeny was pure as pure could be and added, "Which is to say, she did not go to the glen in order to mix with men."
"When I see Miss Mackay on Monday morning," said Miss Brodie, "I shall point out that by the terms of my employment my methods cannot be condemned unless they can be proved to be in any part improper or subversive, and so long as the girls are in the least equipped for the end-of-term examination. I trust you girls to work hard and try and scrape through, even if you learn up the stuff and forget it next day. As for impropriety, it could never be imputed to me except by some gross distortion on the part of a traitor. I do not think ever to be betrayed. Miss Mackay is younger than I am and higher salaried. That is by accident. The best qualifications available at the University in my time were inferior to those open to Miss Mackay. That is why she holds the senior position. But her reasoning power is deficient, and so I have no fears for Monday."
"Miss Mackay has an awfully red face, with the veins all showing," said Rose.
"I can't permit that type of remark to pass in my presence, Rose," said Miss Brodie, "for it would be disloyal."
They had come to the end of Lauriston Place, past the fire station, where they were to get on a tram car to go to tea with Miss Brodie in her flat at Churchhill. A very long queue of men lined this part of the street. They were without collars, in shabby suits. They were talking and spitting and smoking little bits of cigarette held between middle finger and thumb.
"We shall cross here," said Miss Brodie and herded the set across the road.
Monica Douglas whispered, "They are the Idle."
"In England they are called the Unemployed. They are waiting to get their dole from the labour bureau," said Miss Brodie. "You must all pray for the Unemployed, I will write you out the special prayer for them. You all know what the dole is?"
Eunice Gardiner had not heard of it.
"It is the weekly payment made by the State for the relief of the unemployed and their families. Sometimes they go and spend their dole on drink before they go home, and their children starve. They are our brothers. Sandy, stop staring at once. In Italy the Unemployment problem has been solved."
Sandy felt that she was not staring across the road at the endless queue of brothers, but that it was pulling her eyes towards it. She felt once more very frightened. Some of the men looked over at the girls, but without seeing them. The girls had reached the tram stop. The men were talking and spitting a great deal. Some were laughing with hacking laughs merging into coughs and ending up with spits.
As they waited for the tram car Miss Brodie said, "I had lodgings in this street when first I came to Edinburgh as a student. I must tell you a story about the landlady, who was very frugal. It was her habit to come to me every morning to ask what I would have for breakfast, and she spoke like this: 'Wud ye have a red herrin? — no ye wouldn't. Could ye eat a boilt egg? — no ye couldn't.' The result was, I never had but bread and butter to my breakfast all the time I was in those lodgings, and very little of that."
The laughter of the girls met that of the men opposite, who had now begun to file slowly by fits and starts into the labour bureau. Sandy's fear returned as soon as she had stopped laughing. She saw the slow jerkily moving file tremble with life, she saw it all of a piece like one dragon's body which had no right to be in the city and yet would not go away and was unslayable. She thought of the starving children. This was a relief to her fear. She wanted to cry as she always did when she saw a street singer or a beggar. She wanted Jenny to be there, because Jenny cried easily about poor children. But the snaky creature opposite started to shiver in the cold and made Sandy tremble again. She turned and said to Mary Macgregor who had brushed against her sleeve, "Stop pushing."
"Mary, dear, you mustn't push," said Miss Brodie.
"I wasn't pushing," said Mary.
In the tram car Sandy excused herself from tea with Miss Brodie on the plea that she thought she had a cold coming on. Indeed she shivered. She wanted at that moment to be warmly at home, outside which even the corporate Brodie set lived in a colder sort of way.
But later, when Sandy thought of Eunice doing somersaults and splits on Miss Brodie's kitchen linoleum while the other girls washed up, she rather wished she had gone to tea at Miss Brodie's after all. She took out her secret notebook from between the sheets of music and added a chapter to "The Mountain Eyrie," the true love story of Miss Jean Brodie.
3
The days passed and the wind blew from the Forth.
It is not to be supposed that Miss Brodie was unique at this point of her prime; or that (since such things are relative) she was in any way off her head. She was alone, merely, in that she taught in a school like Marcia Blaine's. There were legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties, women from the age of thirty and upward, who crowded their war-bereaved spinsterhood with voyages of discovery into new ideas and energetic practices in art or social welfare, education or religion. The progressive spinsters of Edinburgh did not teach in schools, especially in schools of traditional character like Marcia Blaine's School for Girls. It was in this that Miss Brodie was, as the rest of the staff spinsterhood put it, a trifle out of place. But she was not out of place amongst her own kind, the vigorous daughters of dead or enfeebled merchants, of ministers of religion, University professors, doctors, big warehouse owners of the past, or the owners of fisheries who had endowed these daughters with shrewd wits, high-coloured cheeks, constitutions like horses, logical educations, hearty spirits and private means. They could be seen leaning over the democratic counters of Edinburgh grocers' shops arguing with the Manager at three in the afternoon on every subject from the authenticity of the Scriptures to the question what the word "guaranteed" on a jam-jar really meant. They went to lectures, tried living on honey and nuts, took lessons in German and then went walking in Germany; they bought caravans and went off with them into the hills among the lochs; they played the guitar, they supported all the new little theatre companies; they took lodgings in the slums and, distributing pots of paint, taught their neighbours the arts of simple interior decoration; they preached the inventions of Marie Stopes; they attended the meetings of the Oxford Group and put Spiritualism to their hawk-eyed test. Some assisted in the Scottish Nationalist Movement; others, like Miss Brodie, called themselves Europeans and Edinburgh a European capital, the city of Hume and Boswell.
They were not, however, committee women. They were not school-teachers. The committee spinsters were less enterprising and not at all rebellious, they were sober churchgoers and quiet workers. The school-mistresses were of a still more orderly type, earning their keep, living with aged parents and taking walks on the hills and holidays at North Berwick.
But those of Miss Brodie's kind were great talkers and feminists and, like most feminists, talked to men as man-to-man.
"I tell you this, Mr. Geddes, birth control is the only answer to the problem of the working class. A free issue to every household..."
And often in the thriving grocers' shops at three in the afternoon:
"Mr. Logan, Elder though you are, I am a woman in my prime of life, so you can take it from me that you get a sight more religion out of Professor Tovey's Sunday concerts than you do out of your kirk services."
And so, seen in this light, there was nothing outwardly odd about Miss Brodie. Inwardly was a different matter, and it remained to be seen, towards what extremities her nature worked her. Outwardly she differed from the rest of the teaching staff in that she was still in a state of fluctuating development, whereas they had only too understandably not trusted themselves to change their minds, particularly on ethical questions, after the age of twenty. There was nothing Miss Brodie could not yet learn, she boasted of it. And it was not a static Miss Brodie who told her girls, "These are the years of my prime. You are benefiting by my prime," but one whose nature was growing under their eyes, as the girls themselves were under formation. It extended, this prime of Miss Brodie's, still in the making when the girls were well on in their teens. And the principles governing the end of her prime would have astonished herself at the beginning of it.
The summer holidays of nineteen-thirty-one marked the first anniversary of the launching of Miss Brodie's prime. The year to come was in many ways the most sexual year of the Brodie set, who were now turned eleven and twelve; it was a crowded year of stirring revelations. In later years, sex was only one of the things in life. That year it was everything.
The term opened vigorously as usual. Miss Brodie stood bronzed before her class and said, "I have spent most of my summer holidays in Italy once more, and a week in London, and I have brought back a great many pictures which we can pin on the wall. Here is a Cimabue. Here is a larger formation of Mussolini's fascisti, it is a better view of them than that of last year's picture. They are doing splendid things as I shall tell you later. I went with my friends for an audience with the Pope.
My friends kissed his ring but I thought it proper only to bend over it. I wore a long black gown with a lace mantilla, and looked magnificent. In London my friends who are well-to-do — their small girl has two nurses, or nannies as they say in England — took me to visit A. A. Milne. In the hall was hung a reproduction of Botticelli's Primavera which means The Birth of Spring. I wore my silk dress with the large red poppies which is just right for my colouring. Mussolini is one of the greatest men in the world, far more so than Ramsay MacDonald, and his fascisti———"
"Good morning, Miss Brodie. Good morning, sit down, girls," said the headmistress who had entered in a hurry, leaving the door wide open.
Miss Brodie passed behind her with her head up, up, and shut the door with the utmost meaning.
"I have only just looked in," said Miss Mackay, "and I have to be off. Well, girls, this is the first day of the new session. Are we downhearted? No. You girls must work hard this year at every subject and pass your qualifying examination with flying colours. Next year you will be in the Senior school, remember. I hope you've all had a nice summer holiday, you all look nice and brown. I hope in due course of time to read your essays on how you spent them."
When she had gone Miss Brodie looked hard at the door for a long time. A girl, not of her set, called Judith, giggled. Miss Brodie said to Judith, "That will do." She turned to the blackboard and rubbed out with her duster the long division sum she always kept on the blackboard in case of intrusions from outside during any arithmetic period when Miss Brodie should happen not to be teaching arithmetic. When she had done this she turned back to the class and said, "Are we downhearted no, are we downhearted no. As I was saying, Mussolini has performed feats of magnitude and unemployment is even farther abolished under him than it was last year. I shall be able to tell you a great deal this term. As you know, I don't believe in talking down to children, you are capable of grasping more than is generally appreciated by your elders. Education means a leading out, from e, out and duco, I lead. Qualifying examination or no qualifying examination, you will have the benefit of my experiences in Italy. In Rome I saw the Forum and I saw the Colosseum where the gladiators died and the slaves were thrown to the lions. A vulgar American remarked to me, 'It looks like a mighty fine quarry.' They talk nasally. Mary, what does to talk nasally mean?"
Mary did not know.
"Stupid as ever," said Miss Brodie. "Eunice?"
"Through your nose," said Eunice.
"Answer in a complete sentence, please," said Miss Brodie. "This year I think you should all start answering in complete sentences, I must try to remember this rule. Your correct answer is 'To talk nasally means to talk through one's nose.' The American said, 'It looks like a mighty fine quarry.' Ah! It was there the gladiators fought. 'Hail Caesar!' they cried. These about to die salute thee!'"
Miss Brodie stood in her brown dress like a gladiator with raised arm and eyes flashing like a sword. "Hail Caesar!" she cried again, turning radiantly to the window light, as if Caesar sat there. "Who opened the window?" said Miss Brodie dropping her arm.
Nobody answered.
"Whoever has opened the window has opened it too wide," said Miss Brodie. "Six inches is perfectly adequate. More is vulgar. One should have an innate sense of these things. We ought to be doing history at the moment according to the time-table. Get out your history books and prop them up in your hands. I shall tell you a little more about Italy. I met a young poet by a fountain. Here is a picture of Dante meeting Beatrice — it is pronounced Beatrichay in Italian which makes the name very beautiful — on the Ponte Vecchio. He fell in love with her at that moment. Mary, sit up and don't slouch. It was a sublime moment in a sublime love. By whom was the picture painted?"
Nobody knew.
"It was painted by Rossetti. Who was Rossetti, Jenny?"
"A painter," said Jenny.
Miss Brodie looked suspicious.
"And a genius," said Sandy, to come to Jenny's rescue.
"A friend of———?" said Miss Brodie.
"Swinburne," said a girl.
Miss Brodie smiled. "You have not forgotten," she said, looking round the class. "Holidays or no holidays. Keep your history books propped up in case we have any further intruders." She looked disapprovingly towards the door and lifted her fine dark Roman head with dignity. She had often told the girls that her dead Hugh had admired her head for its Roman appearance.
"Next year," she said, "you will have the specialists to teach you history and mathematics and languages, a teacher for this and a teacher for that, a period of forty-five minutes for this and another for that. But in this your last year with me you will receive the fruits of my prime. They will remain with you all your days. First, however, I must mark the register for today before we forget. There are two new girls. Stand up the two new girls."
They stood up with wide eyes while Miss Brodie sat down at her desk.
"You will get used to our ways. What religions are you?" said Miss Brodie with her pen poised on the page while, outside in the sky, the gulls from the Firth of Forth wheeled over the school and the green and golden tree-tops swayed towards the windows.

@настроение: happy

@темы: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Расцвет мисс Джин Броди, Мюриэл Спарк

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[Dorothy Zbornak]

"Come autumn sae pensive, in yellow and gray, And soothe me wi' tidings o' nature's decay —Robert Burns," said Miss Brodie when she had closed the register. "We are now well into the nineteen-thirties. I have four pounds of rosy apples in my desk, a gift from Mr. Lowther's orchard, let us eat them now while the coast is clear — not but what the apples do not come under my own jurisdiction, but discretion is... discretion is... Sandy?"
"The better part of valour, Miss Brodie." Her little eyes looked at Miss Brodie in a slightly smaller way.
Even before the official opening of her prime Miss Brodie's colleagues in the Junior school had been gradually turning against her. The teaching staff of the Senior school was indifferent or mildly amused, for they had not yet felt the impact of the Brodie set; that was to come the following year, and even then these Senior mistresses were not unduly irritated by the effects of what they called Miss Brodie's experimental methods. It was in the Junior school, among the lesser paid and lesser qualified women, with whom Miss Brodie had daily dealings, that indignation seethed. There were two exceptions on the staff, who felt neither resentment nor indifference towards Miss Brodie, but were, on the contrary, her supporters on every count. One of these was Mr. Gordon Lowther, the singing master for the whole school, Junior and Senior. The other was Mr. Teddy Lloyd, the Senior girls' art master. They were the only men on the staff. Both were already a little in love with Miss Brodie, for they found in her the only sex-bestirred object in their daily environment, and although they did not realise it, both were already beginning to act as rivals for her attention. But so far, they had not engaged her attention as men, she knew them only as supporters, and was proudly grateful. It was the Brodie set who discerned, before she did, and certainly these men did, that Mr. Lowther and Mr. Lloyd were at pains to appear well, each in his exclusive right before Miss Brodie.
To the Brodie set Gordon Lowther and Teddy Lloyd looked rather like each other until habitual acquaintance proved that they looked very different. Both were red-gold in colouring. Teddy Lloyd, the art master, was by far the better-shaped, the better-featured and the more sophisticated. He was said to be half Welsh, half English. He spoke with a hoarse voice as if he had bronchitis all the time. A golden forelock of his hair fell over his forehead into his eyes. Most wonderful of all, he had only one arm, the right, with which he painted. The other was a sleeve tucked into his pocket. He had lost the contents of the sleeve in the Great War.
Miss Brodie's class had only once had an opportunity to size him up closely, and then it was in a dimmed light, for the blinds of the art room had been drawn to allow Mr. Lloyd to show his lantern slides. They had been marched into the art room by Miss Brodie, who was going to sit with the girls on the end of a bench, when the art master came forward with a chair for her held in his one hand and presented in a special way with a tiny inflection of the knees, like a flunkey. Miss Brodie seated herself nobly like Britannia with her legs apart under her loose brown skirt which came well over her knees. Mr. Lloyd showed his pictures from an exhibition of Italian art in London. He had a pointer with which he indicated the design of the picture in accompaniment to his hoarse voice. He said nothing of what the pictures represented, only followed each curve and line as the artist had left it off — perhaps at the point of an elbow, and picked it up — perhaps at the edge of a cloud or the back of a chair. The ladies of the Primavera, in their netball-playing postures, provided Mr. Lloyd with much pointer work. He kept on passing the pointer along the lines of their bottoms which showed through the drapery. The third time he did this a collective quiver of mirth ran along the front row of girls, then spread to the back rows. They kept their mouths shut tight against these convulsions, but the tighter their lips, the more did the little gusts of humour escape through their noses. Mr. Lloyd looked round with offended exasperation.
"It is obvious," said Miss Brodie, "that these girls are not of cultured homes and heritage. The Philistines are upon us, Mr. Lloyd."
The girls, anxious to be of cultured and sexless antecedents, were instantly composed by the shock of this remark. But immediately Mr. Lloyd resumed his demonstration of artistic form, and again dragged his pointer all round the draped private parts of one of Botticelli's female subjects, Sandy affected to have a fit of spluttering coughs, as did several girls behind her. Others groped under their seat as if looking for something they had dropped. One or two frankly leant against each other and giggled with hands to their helpless mouths.
"I am surprised at you, Sandy," said Miss Brodie. "I thought you were the leaven in the lump."
Sandy looked up from her coughs with a hypocritical blinking of her eyes. Miss Brodie, however, had already fastened on Mary Macgregor who was nearest to her. Mary's giggles had been caused by contagion, for she was too stupid to have any sex-wits of her own, and Mr. Lloyd's lesson would never have affected her unless it had first affected the rest of the class. But now she was giggling openly like a dirty-minded child of an uncultured home. Miss Brodie grasped Mary's arm, jerked her to her feet and propelled her to the door where she thrust her outside and shut her out, returning as one who had solved the whole problem. As indeed she had, for the violent action sobered the girls and made them feel that, in the official sense, an unwanted ring-leader had been apprehended and they were no longer in the wrong.
As Mr. Lloyd had now switched his equipment to a depiction of the Madonna and Child, Miss Brodie's action was the more appreciated, for no one in the class would have felt comfortable at being seized with giggles while Mr. Lloyd's pointer was tracing the outlines of this sacred subject. In fact, they were rather shocked that Mr. Lloyd's hoarse voice did not change its tone in the slightest for this occasion, but went on stating what the painter had done with his brush; he was almost defiant in his methodical tracing of lines all over the Mother and the Son. Sandy caught his glance towards Miss Brodie as if seeking her approval for his very artistic attitude and Sandy saw her smile back as would a goddess with superior understanding smile to a god away on the mountain tops.
It was not long after this that Monica Douglas, later famous for mathematics and anger, claimed that she had seen Mr. Lloyd in the act of kissing Miss Brodie. She was very definite about it in her report to the five other members of the Brodie set. There was a general excited difficulty in believing her.
"When?"
"Where?"
"In the art room after school yesterday."

[Dorothy Zbornak]

"What were you doing in the art room?" said Sandy who took up the role of cross-examiner.
"I went to get a new sketch pad."
"Why? You haven't finished your old sketch pad yet."
"I have," said Monica.
"When did you use up your old sketch pad?"
"Last Saturday afternoon when you were playing golf with Miss Brodie."
It was true that Jenny and Sandy had done nine holes on the Braid Hills course with Miss Brodie on the previous Saturday, while the rest of the Brodie set wandered afield to sketch.
"Monica used up all her book. She did the Tee Woods from five angles," said Rose Stanley in verification.
"What part of the art room were they standing in?" Sandy said.
"The far side," Monica said. "I know he had his arm round her and was kissing her. They jumped apart when I opened the door."
"Which arm?" Sandy snapped.
"The right of course, he hasn't got a left."
"Were you inside or outside the room when you saw them?" Sandy said.
"Well, in and out. I saw them, I tell you."
"What did they say?" Jenny said.
"They didn't see me," said Monica. "I just turned and ran away."
"Was it a long and lingering kiss?" Sandy demanded, while Jenny came closer to hear the answer.
Monica cast the corner of her eye up to the ceiling as if doing mental arithmetic. Then when her calculation was finished she said, "Yes it was."
"How do you know if you didn't stop to see how long it was?"
"I know," said Monica, getting angry, "by the bit that I did see. It was a small bit of a good long kiss that I saw, I could see it by his arm being round her, and———"
"I don't believe all this," Sandy said squeakily, because she was excited and desperately trying to prove the report true by eliminating the doubts. "You must have been dreaming," she said.
Monica pecked with the fingers of her right hand at Sandy's arm, and pinched the skin of it with a nasty half-turn. Sandy screamed. Monica, whose face was becoming very red, swung the attaché case which held her books, so that it hit the girls who stood in its path and made them stand back from her.
"She's losing her temper," said Eunice Gardiner, skipping.
"I don't believe what she says," said Sandy, desperately trying to visualise the scene in the art room and to goad factual Monica into describing it with due feeling.
"I believe it," said Rose. "Mr. Lloyd is an artist and Miss Brodie is artistic too."
Jenny said, "Didn't they see the door opening?"
"Yes," said Monica, "they jumped apart as I opened the door."
"How did you know they didn't see you?" Sandy said.
"I got away before they turned round. They were standing at the far end of the room beside the still-life curtain." She went to the classroom door and demonstrated her quick get-away. This was not dramatically satisfying to Sandy who went out of the classroom, opened the door, looked, opened her eyes in a startled way, gasped and retreated in a flash. She seemed satisfied by her experimental renactment but it so delighted her friends that she repeated it. Miss Brodie came up behind her on her fourth performance which had reached a state of extreme flourish.
"What are you doing, Sandy?" said Miss Brodie.
"Only playing," said Sandy, photographing this new Miss Brodie with her little eyes.
The question of whether Miss Brodie was actually capable of being kissed and of kissing occupied the Brodie set till Christmas. For the war-time romance of her life had presented to their minds a Miss Brodie of hardly flesh and blood, since that younger Miss Brodie belonged to the prehistory of before their birth. Sitting under the elm last autumn, Miss Brodie's story of "when I was a girl" had seemed much less real, and yet more believable than this report by Monica Douglas. The Brodie set decided to keep the incident to themselves lest, if it should spread to the rest of the class, it should spread wider still and eventually to someone's ears who would get Monica Douglas into trouble.
There was, indeed, a change in Miss Brodie. It was not merely that Sandy and Jenny, recasting her in their minds, now began to try to imagine her as someone called "Jean." There was a change in herself. She wore newer clothes and with them a glowing amber necklace which was of such real amber that, as she once showed them, it had magnetic properties when rubbed and then applied to a piece of paper.
The change in Miss Brodie was best discerned by comparison with the other teachers in the Junior school. If you looked at them and then looked at Miss Brodie it was more possible to imagine her giving herself up to kissing.
Jenny and Sandy wondered if Mr. Lloyd and Miss Brodie had gone further that day in the art room, and had been swept away by passion. They kept an eye on Miss Brodie's stomach to see if it showed signs of swelling. Some days, if they were bored, they decided it had begun to swell. But on Miss Brodie's entertaining days they found her stomach as flat as ever and at these times even agreed together that Monica Douglas had been telling a lie.
The other Junior school teachers said good morning to Miss Brodie, these days, in a more than Edinburgh manner, that is to say it was gracious enough, and not one of them omitted to say good morning at all; but Sandy, who had turned eleven, perceived that the tone of "morning" in good morning made the word seem purposely to rhyme with "scorning," so that these colleagues of Miss Brodie's might just as well have said, "I scorn you," instead of good morning. Miss Brodie's reply was more anglicised in its accent than was its usual proud wont. "Good mawning," she replied, in the corridors, flattening their scorn beneath the chariot wheels of her superiority, and deviating her head towards them no more than an insulting half-inch. She held her head up, up, as she walked, and often, when she reached and entered her own classroom, permitted herself to sag gratefully against the door for an instant. She did not frequent the staff common rooms in the free periods when her class was taking its singing or sewing lessons, but accompanied them.
Now the two sewing teachers were somewhat apart from the rest of the teaching staff and were not taken seriously. They were the two younger sisters of a third, dead, eldest sister whose guidance of their lives had never been replaced. Their names were Miss Ellen and Miss Alison Kerr; they were incapable of imparting any information whatsoever, so flustered were they, with their fluffed-out hair, dry blue-grey skins and birds' eyes; instead of teaching sewing they took each girl's work in hand, one by one, and did most of it for her. In the worst cases they unstitched what had been done and did it again, saying, "This'll not do," or, "That's never a run and fell seam." The sewing sisters had not as yet been induced to judge Miss Brodie since they were by nature of the belief that their scholastic colleagues were above criticism. Therefore the sewing lessons were a great relaxation to all, and Miss Brodie in the time before Christmas used the sewing period each week to read Jane Eyre to her class who, while they listened, pricked their thumbs as much as was bearable so that interesting little spots of blood might appear on the stuff they were sewing, and it was even possible to make blood-spot designs.
The singing lessons were far different. Some weeks after the report of her kissing in the art room it gradually became plain that Miss Brodie was agitated before, during, and after the singing lessons. She wore her newest clothes on singing days.
Sandy said to Monica Douglas, "Are you sure it was Mr. Lloyd who kissed her? Are you sure it wasn't Mr. Lowther?"
"It was Mr. Lloyd," said Monica, "and it was in the art room, not the music room. What would Mr. Lowther have been doing in the art room?"
"They look alike, Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Lowther," Sandy said.
Monica's anger was rising in her face. "It was Mr. Lloyd with his one arm round her," she said. "I saw them. I'm sorry I ever told you. Rose is the only one that believes me."
Rose Stanley believed her, but this was because she was indifferent. She was the least of all the Brodie set to be excited by Miss Brodie's love affairs, or by anyone else's sex. And it was always to be the same. Later, when she was famous for sex, her magnificently appealing qualities lay in the fact that she had no curiosity about sex at all, she never reflected upon it. As Miss Brodie was to say, she had instinct.
"Rose is the only one who believes me," said Monica Douglas.
When she visited Sandy at the nunnery in the late nineteen-fifties, Monica said, "I really did see Teddy Lloyd kiss Miss Brodie in the art room one day."
"I know you did," said Sandy.
She knew it even before Miss Brodie had told her so one day after the end of the war, when they sat in the Braid Hills Hotel eating sandwiches and drinking tea which Miss Brodie's rations at home would not run to. Miss Brodie sat shrivelled and betrayed in her long-preserved dark musquash coat. She had been retired before time. She said, "I am past my prime."
"It was a good prime," said Sandy.
They looked out of the wide windows at the little Braid Burn trickling through the fields and at the hills beyond, so austere from everlasting that they had never been capable of losing anything by the war.
"Teddy Lloyd was greatly in love with me, as you know," said Miss Brodie, "and I with him. It was a great love. One day in the art room he kissed me. We never became lovers, not even after you left Edinburgh, when the temptation was strongest." Sandy stared through her little eyes at the hills.
"But I renounced him," said Miss Brodie. "He was a married man. I renounced the great love of my prime. We had everything in common, the artistic nature."

[Dorothy Zbornak]

She had reckoned on her prime lasting till she was sixty. But this, the year after the war, was in fact Miss Brodie's last and fifty-sixth year. She looked older than that, she was suffering from an internal growth. This was her last year in the world and in another sense it was Sandy's.
Miss Brodie sat in her defeat and said, "In the late autumn of nineteen-thirty-one — are you listening, Sandy?"
Sandy took her eyes from the hills.
In the late autumn of nineteen-thirty-one Miss Brodie was away from school for two weeks. It was understood she had an ailment. The Brodie set called at her flat after school with flowers and found no one at home. On enquiring at school next day they were told she had gone to the country to stay with a friend until she was better.
In the meantime Miss Brodie's class was dispersed, and squashed in among the classes of her colleagues. The Brodie set stuck together and were placed with a gaunt woman who was, in fact, a Miss Gaunt from the Western Isles who wore a knee-length skirt made from what looked like grey blanket stuff; this had never been smart even in the knee-length days; Rose Stanley said it was cut short for economy. Her head was very large and bony. Her chest was a slight bulge flattened by a bust bodice, and her jersey was a dark forbidding green. She did not care at all for the Brodie set who were stunned by a sudden plunge into industrious learning and very put out by Miss Gaunt's horrible sharpness and strict insistence on silence throughout the day.
"Oh dear," said Rose out loud one day when they were settled to essay writing, "I can't remember how you spell 'possession.' Are there two s's or———?"
"A hundred lines of Marmion," Miss Gaunt flung at her.
The black-marks book which eventually reflected itself on the end-of-term reports, was heavily scored with the names of the Brodie set by the end of the first week. Apart from enquiring their names for this purpose Miss Gaunt did not trouble to remember them. "You, girl," she would say to every Brodie face. So dazed were the Brodie girls that they did not notice the omission during that week of their singing lesson which should have been on Wednesday.
On Thursday they were herded into the sewing room in the early afternoon. The two sewing teachers, Miss Alison and Miss Ellen Kerr, seemed rather cowed by gaunt Miss Gaunt, and applied themselves briskly to the sewing machines which they were teaching the girls to use. The shuttle of the sewing machines went up and down, which usually caused Sandy and Jenny to giggle, since at that time everything that could conceivably bear a sexual interpretation immediately did so to them. But the absence of Miss Brodie and the presence of Miss Gaunt had a definite subtracting effect from the sexual significance of everything, and the trepidation of the two sewing sisters contributed to the effect of grim realism.
Miss Gaunt evidently went to the same parish church as the Kerr sisters, to whom she addressed remarks from time to time while she embroidered a tray cloth.
"My brothurr..." she kept saying, "my brothurr says..."
Miss Gaunt's brother was apparently the minister of the parish, which accounted for the extra precautions Miss Alison and Miss Ellen were taking about their work today, with the result that they got a lot of the sewing mixed up.
"My brothurr is up in the morning at five-thirty... My brothurr organised a..."
Sandy was thinking of the next instalment of Jane Eyre which Miss Brodie usually enlivened this hour by reading. Sandy had done with Alan Breck and had taken up with Mr. Rochester, with whom she now sat in the garden.
"You are afraid of me, Miss Sandy."
"You talk like the Sphinx, sir, but I am not afraid."
"You have such a grave, quiet manner, Miss Sandy — you are going?"
"It has struck nine, sir."
A phrase of Miss Gaunt's broke upon the garden scene: "Mr. Lowther is not at school this week."
"So I hear," Miss Alison said.
"It seems he will be away for another week at least."
"Is he ill?"
"I understand so, unfortunately," said Miss Gaunt.
"Miss Brodie is ailing, too," said Miss Ellen.
"Yes," said Miss Gaunt. "She too is expected to be absent for another week."
"What is the trouble?"
"That I couldn't say," said Miss Gaunt. She stuck her needle in and out of her embroidery. Then she looked up at the sisters. "It may be Miss Brodie has the same complaint as Mr. Lowther," she said.
Sandy saw her face as that of the housekeeper in Jane Eyre, watching her carefully and knowingly as she entered the house, late, from the garden where she had been sitting with Mr. Rochester.
"Perhaps Miss Brodie is having a love affair with Mr. Lowther," Sandy said to Jenny, merely in order to break up the sexless gloom that surrounded them.
"But it was Mr. Lloyd who kissed her. She must be in love with Mr. Lloyd or she wouldn't have let him kiss her."
"Perhaps she's working it off on Mr. Lowther. Mr. Lowther isn't married."
It was a fantasy worked up between them, in defiance of Miss Gaunt and her forbidding brother, and it was understood in that way. But Sandy, remembering Miss Gaunt's expression as she remarked, "It may be Miss Brodie has the same complaint as Mr. Lowther," was suddenly not sure that the suggestion was not true. For this reason she was more reticent than Jenny about the details of the imagined love affair. Jenny whispered, "They go to bed. Then he puts out the light. Then their toes touch. And then Miss Brodie... Miss Brodie..." She broke into giggles.
"Miss Brodie yawns," said Sandy in order to restore decency, now that she suspected it was all true.
"No, Miss Brodie says, 'Darling.' She says———"
"Quiet," whispered Sandy, "Eunice is coming."
Eunice Gardiner approached the table where Jenny and Sandy sat, grabbed the scissors and went away. Eunice had lately taken a religious turn and there was no talking about sex in front of her. She had stopped hopping and skipping. The phase did not last long, but while it did she was nasty and not to be trusted. When she was well out of the way Jenny resumed:
"Mr. Lowther's legs are shorter than Miss Brodie's, so I suppose she winds hers round his, and———"
"Where does Mr. Lowther live, do you know?" Sandy said.
"At Cramond. He's got a big house with a housekeeper."
In that year after the war when Sandy sat with Miss Brodie in the window of the Braid Hills Hotel, and brought her eyes back from the hills to show she was listening, Miss Brodie said:
"I renounced Teddy Lloyd. But I decided to enter into a love affair, it was the only cure. My love for Teddy was an obsession, he was the love of my prime. But in the autumn of nineteen-thirty-one I entered an affair with Gordon Lowther, he was a bachelor and it was more becoming. That is the truth and there is no more to say. Are you listening, Sandy?"
"Yes, I'm listening."
"You look as if you were thinking of something else, my dear. Well, as I say, that is the whole story."
Sandy was thinking of something else. She was thinking that it was not the whole story.
"Of course the liaison was suspected. Perhaps you girls knew about it. You, Sandy, had a faint idea... but nobody could prove what was between Gordon Lowther and myself. It was never proved. It was not on those grounds that I was betrayed. I should like to know who betrayed me. It is incredible that it should have been one of my own girls. I often wonder if it was poor Mary. Perhaps I should have been nicer to Mary. Well, it was tragic about Mary, I picture that fire, that poor girl. I can't see how Mary could have betrayed me, though."
"She had no contact with the school after she left," Sandy said.
"I wonder, was it Rose who betrayed me?" The whine in her voice — "... betrayed me, betrayed me" — bored and afflicted Sandy. It is seven years, thought Sandy, since I betrayed this tiresome woman. What does she mean by "betray"? She was looking at the hills as if to see there the first and unbetrayable Miss Brodie, indifferent to criticism as a crag.

[Dorothy Zbornak]

After her two weeks' absence Miss Brodie returned to tell her class that she had enjoyed an exciting rest and a well-earned one. Mr. Lowther's singing class went on as usual and he beamed at Miss Brodie as she brought them proudly into the music room with their heads up, up. Miss Brodie now played the accompaniment, sitting very well at the piano and sometimes, with a certain sadness of countenance, richly taking the second soprano in "How sweet is the shepherd's sweet lot," and other melodious preparations for the annual concert. Mr. Lowther, short-legged, shy and golden-haired, no longer played with Jenny's curls. The bare branches brushed the windows and Sandy was almost as sure as could be that the singing master was in love with Miss Brodie and that Miss Brodie was in love with the art master. Rose Stanley had not yet revealed her potentialities in the working-out of Miss Brodie's passion for one-armed Teddy Lloyd, and Miss Brodie's prime still flourished unbetrayed.
It was impossible to imagine Miss Brodie sleeping with Mr. Lowther, it was impossible to imagine her in a sexual context at all, and yet it was impossible not to suspect that such things were so.
During the Easter term Miss Mackay, the headmistress, had the girls in to tea in her study in small groups and, later, one by one. This was a routine of enquiry as to their intentions for the Senior school, whether they would go on the Modern side or whether they would apply for admission to the Classical.
Miss Brodie had already prompted them as follows: "I am not saying anything against the Modern side. Modern and Classical, they are equal, and each provides for a function in life. You must make your free choice. Not everyone is capable of a Classical education. You must make your choice quite freely." So that the girls were left in no doubt as to Miss Brodie's contempt for the Modern side.
From among her special set only Eunice Gardiner stood out to be a Modern, and that was because her parents wanted her to take a course in domestic science and she herself wanted the extra scope for gymnastics and games which the Modern side offered. Eunice, preparing arduously for Confirmation, was still a bit too pious for Miss Brodie's liking. She now refused to do somersaults outside of the gymnasium, she wore lavender water on her handkerchief, declined a try of Rose Stanley's aunt's lipstick, was taking a suspiciously healthy interest in international sport and, when Miss Brodie herded her set to the Empire Theatre for their first and last opportunity to witness the dancing of Pavlova, Eunice was absent, she had pleaded off because of something else she had to attend which she described as "a social."
"Social what?" said Miss Brodie, who always made difficulties about words when she scented heresy.
"It's in the Church Hall, Miss Brodie."
"Yes, yes, but social what? Social is an adjective and you are using it as a noun. If you mean a social gathering, by all means attend your social gathering and we shall have our own social gathering in the presence of the great Anna Pavlova, a dedicated woman who, when she appears on the stage, makes the other dancers look like elephants. By all means attend your social gathering. We shall see Pavlova doing the death of the Swan, it is a great moment in eternity."
All that term she tried to inspire Eunice to become at least a pioneer missionary in some deadly and dangerous zone of the earth, for it was intolerable to Miss Brodie that any of her girls should grow up not largely dedicated to some vocation. "You will end up as a Girl Guide leader in a suburb like Corstorphine," she said warningly to Eunice, who was in fact secretly attracted to this idea and who lived in Corstorphine. The term was filled with legends of Pavlova and her dedicated habits, her wild fits of temperament and her intolerance of the second-rate. "She screams at the chorus," said Miss Brodie, "which is permissible in a great artist. She speaks English fluently, her accent is charming. Afterwards she goes home to meditate upon the swans which she keeps on a lake in the grounds."
"Sandy," said Anna Pavlova, "you are the only truly dedicated dancer, next to me. Your dying Swan is perfect, such a sensitive, final tap of the claw upon the floor of the stage..."
"I know it," said Sandy (in considered preference to "Oh, I do my best"), as she relaxed in the wings.
Pavlova nodded sagely and gazed into the middle distance with the eyes of tragic exile and of art. "Every artist knows," said Pavlova, "is it not so?" Then, with a voice desperate with the menace of hysteria, and a charming accent, she declared, "I have never been understood. Never. Never."
Sandy removed one of her ballet shoes and cast it casually to the other end of the wings where it was respectfully retrieved by a member of the common chorus. Pausing before she removed the other shoe, Sandy said to Pavlova, "I am sure I understand you."
"It is true," exclaimed Pavlova, clasping Sandy's hand, "because you are an artist and will carry on the torch."
Miss Brodie said: "Pavlova contemplates her swans in order to perfect her swan dance, she studies them. That is true dedication. You must all grow up to be dedicated women as I have dedicated myself to you."
A few weeks before she died, when, sitting up in bed in the nursing home, she learnt from Monica Douglas that Sandy had gone to a convent, she said: "What a waste. That is not the sort of dedication I meant. Do you think she has done this to annoy me? I begin to wonder if it was not Sandy who betrayed me."
The headmistress invited Sandy, Jenny and Mary to tea just before the Easter holidays and asked them the usual questions about what they wanted to do in the Senior school and whether they wanted to do it on the Modern or the Classical side. Mary Macgregor was ruled out of the Classical side because her marks did not reach the required standard. She seemed despondent on hearing this.
"Why do you want so much to go on the Classical side, Mary? You aren't cut out for it. Don't your parents realise that?"
"Miss Brodie prefers it."
"It has nothing to do with Miss Brodie," said Miss Mackay, settling her great behind more firmly in her chair. "It is a question of your marks or what you and your parents think. In your case, your marks don't come up to the standard."
When Jenny and Sandy opted for Classical, she said: "Because Miss Brodie prefers it, I suppose. What good will Latin and Greek be to you when you get married or take a job? German would be more useful."
But they stuck out for Classical, and when Miss Mackay had accepted their choice she transparently started to win over the girls by praising Miss Brodie. "What we would do without Miss Brodie, I don't know. There is always a difference about Miss Brodie's girls, and the last two years I may say a marked difference."
Then she began to pump them. Miss Brodie took them to the theatre, the art galleries, for walks, to Miss Brodie's flat for tea? How kind of Miss Brodie. "Does Miss Brodie pay for all your theatre tickets?"
"Sometimes," said Mary.
"Not for all of us every time," said Jenny.
"We go up to the gallery," Sandy said.
"Well, it is most kind of Miss Brodie. I hope you are appreciative."
"Oh, yes," they said, united and alert against anything unfavourable to the Brodie idea which the conversation might be leading up to. This was not lost on the headmistress.
"That's splendid," she said. "And do you go to concerts with Miss Brodie? Miss Brodie is very musical, I believe?"
"Yes," said Mary, looking at her friends for a lead.
"We went to the opera with Miss Brodie last term to see La Traviata" said Jenny.
"Miss Brodie is musical?" said Miss Mackay again, addressing Sandy and Jenny.
"We saw Pavlova," said Sandy.
"Miss Brodie is musical?" said Miss Mackay.
"I think Miss Brodie is more interested in art, ma'am," said Sandy.
"But music is a form of art."
"Pictures and drawings, I mean," said Sandy.
"Very enlightening," said Miss Mackay. "Do you girls take piano lessons?"
They all said yes.
"From whom? From Mr. Lowther?"
They answered variously, for Mr. Lowther's piano lessons were not part of the curriculum and these three girls had private arrangements for the piano at home. But now, at the mention of Mr. Lowther, even slow-minded Mary suspected what Miss Mackay was driving at.
"I understand Miss Brodie plays the piano for your singing lessons. So what makes you think she prefers art to music, Sandy?"
"Miss Brodie told us so. Music is an interest to her but art is a passion, Miss Brodie said."
"And what are your cultural interests? I'm sure you are too young to have passions."
"Stories, ma'am," Mary said.
"Does Miss Brodie tell you stories?"
"Yes," said Mary.
"What about?"
"History," said Jenny and Sandy together, because it was a question they had foreseen might arise one day and they had prepared the answer with a brainracking care for literal truth.
Miss Mackay paused and looked at them in the process of moving the cake from the table to the tray; their reply had plainly struck her as being on the ready side.
She asked no further questions, but made the following noteworthy speech:
"You are very fortunate in Miss Brodie. I could wish your arithmetic papers had been better. I am always impressed by Miss Brodie's girls' in one way or another. You will have to work hard at ordinary humble subjects for the qualifying examinations. Miss Brodie is giving you an excellent preparation for the Senior school. Culture cannot compensate for lack of hard knowledge. I am happy tor see you are devoted to Miss Brodie. Your loyalty is due to the school rather than to any one individual."

[Dorothy Zbornak]

Not all of this conversation was reported back to Miss Brodie.
"We told Miss Mackay how much you liked art," said Sandy, however.
"I do indeed," said Miss Brodie, "but 'like' is hardly the word; pictorial art is my passion."
"That's what I said," said Sandy.
Miss Brodie looked at her as if to say, as in fact she had said twice before, "One day, Sandy, you will go too far for my liking."
"Compared to music," said Sandy, blinking up at her with her little pig-like eyes.
Towards the end of the Easter holidays, to crown the sex-laden year, Jenny, out walking alone, was accosted by a man joyfully exposing himself beside the Water of Leith. He said, "Come and look at this."
"At what?" said Jenny, moving closer, thinking to herself he had picked up a fallen nestling from the ground or had discovered a strange plant. Having perceived the truth, she escaped unharmed and unpursued though breathless, and was presently surrounded by solicitous, horrified relations and was coaxed to sip tea well sugared against the shock. Later in the day, since the incident had been reported to the police, came a wonderful policewoman to question Jenny.
These events contained enough exciting possibilities to set the rest of the Easter holidays spinning like a top and to last out the whole of the summer term. The first effect on Sandy was an adverse one, for she had been on the point of obtaining permission to go for walks alone in just such isolated spots as that in which Jenny's encounter had taken place. Sandy was now still forbidden lone walks, but this was a mere by-effect of the affair.
The rest brought nothing but good. The subject fell under two headings: first, the man himself and the nature of what he had exposed to view, and secondly the policewoman.
The first was fairly quickly exhausted.
"He was a horrible creature," said Jenny.
"A terrible beast," said Sandy.
The question of the policewoman was inexhaustible, and although Sandy never saw her, nor at that time any policewoman (for these were in the early days of the women police), she quite deserted Alan Breck and Mr. Rochester and all the heroes of fiction for the summer term, and fell in love with the unseen policewoman who had questioned Jenny; and in this way she managed to keep alive Jenny's enthusiasm too.
"What did she look like? Did she wear a helmet?"
"No, a cap. She had short, fair, curly hair curling under the cap. And a dark blue uniform. She said, 'Now tell me all about it.'"
"And what did you say?" said Sandy for the fourth time.
For the fourth time Jenny replied: "Well, I said, 'The man was walking along under the trees by the bank, and he was holding something in his hand. And then when he saw me he laughed out loud and said, come and look at this. I said, at what? And I went a bit closer and I saw...' — but I couldn't tell the policewoman what I saw, could I? So the policewoman said to me, 'You saw something nasty?' And I said, 'Yes.' Then she asked me what the man was like, and..."
But this was the same story all over again. Sandy wanted new details about the policewoman, she looked for clues. Jenny had pronounced the word "nasty" as "nesty," which was unusual for Jenny.
"Did she say 'nasty' or 'nesty'?" said Sandy on this fourth telling.
"Nesty."
This gave rise to an extremely nasty feeling in Sandy and it put her off the idea of sex for months. All the more as she disapproved of the pronunciation of the word, it made her flesh creep, and she plagued Jenny to change her mind and agree that the policewoman had pronounced it properly.
"A lot of people say nesty," said Jenny.
"I know, but I don't like them. They're neither one thing nor another."
It bothered Sandy a great deal, and she had to invent a new speaking-image for the policewoman. Another thing that troubled her was that Jenny did not know the policewoman's name, or even whether she was addressed as "constable,"
"sergeant," or merely "miss." Sandy decided to call her Sergeant Anne Grey. Sandy was Anne Grey's right-hand woman in the Force, and they were dedicated to eliminate sex from Edinburgh and environs. In the Sunday newspapers, to which Sandy had free access, the correct technical phrases were to be found, such as "intimacy took place" and "plaintiff was in a certain condition." Females who were up for sex were not called "Miss" or "Mrs.," they were referred to by their surnames: "Willis was remanded in custody...," "Roebuck, said Counsel, was discovered to be in a certain condition."
So Sandy pushed her dark blue police force cap to the back of her head and sitting on a stile beside Sergeant Anne Grey watched the spot between the trees by the Water of Leith where the terrible beast had appeared who had said, "Look at this," to Jenny, but where, in fact, Sandy never was.
"And another thing," said Sandy, "we've got to find out more about the case of Brodie and whether she is yet in a certain condition as a consequence of her liaison with Gordon Lowther, described as singing master, Marcia Blaine School for Girls."
"Intimacy has undoubtedly taken place," said Sergeant Anne, looking very nice in her dark uniform and short-cropped curls blondely fringing her cap. She said, "All we need are a few incriminating documents."
"Leave all that to me, Sergeant Anne," said Sandy, because she was at that very time engaged with Jenny in composing the love correspondence between Miss Brodie and the singing master. Sergeant Anne pressed Sandy's hand in gratitude; and they looked into each other's eyes, their mutual understanding too deep for words.
At school after the holidays the Water of Leith affair was kept a secret between Jenny and Sandy, for Jenny's mother had said the story must not be spread about. But it seemed natural that Miss Brodie should be told in a spirit of sensational confiding.
But something made Sandy say to Jenny on the first afternoon of the term: "Don't tell Miss Brodie."
"Why?" said Jenny.
Sandy tried to work out the reason. It was connected with the undecided state of Miss Brodie's relationship to cheerful Mr. Lowther, and with the fact that she had told her class, first thing: "I have spent Easter at the little Roman village of Cramond." That was where Mr. Lowther lived all alone in a big house with a housekeeper.
"Don't tell Miss Brodie," said Sandy.
"Why?" said Jenny.
Sandy made an effort to work out her reasons. They were also connected with something that had happened in the course of the morning, when Miss Brodie, wanting a supply of drawing books and charcoal to start the new term, sent Monica Douglas to fetch them from the art room, then called her back, and sent Rose Stanley instead. When Rose returned, laden with drawing books and boxes of chalks, she was followed by Teddy Lloyd, similarly laden. He dumped his books and asked Miss Brodie if she had enjoyed her holiday. She gave him her hand, and said she had been exploring Cramond, one should not neglect these little nearby seaports.
"I shouldn't have thought there was much to explore at Cramond," said Mr. Lloyd, smiling at her with his golden forelock falling into his eye.
"It has quite a lot of charm," she said. "And did you go away at all?"
"I've been painting," he said in his hoarse voice. "Family portraits."
Rose had been stacking the drawing books into their cupboard and now she had finished. As she turned, Miss Brodie put her arm round Rose's shoulder and thanked Mr. Lloyd for his help, as if she and Rose were one.
"N'tall," said Mr. Lloyd, meaning, "Not at all," and went away. It was then Jenny whispered, "Rose has changed in the holidays, hasn't she?"
This was true. Her fair hair was cut shorter and was very shiny. Her cheeks were paler and thinner, her eyes less wide open, set with the lids half-shut as if she were posing for a special photograph.
"Perhaps she has got the Change," said Sandy. Miss Brodie called it the Menarche but so far when they tried to use this word amongst themselves it made them giggle and feel shy.
Later in the afternoon after school, Jenny said: "I'd better tell Miss Brodie about the man I met."
Sandy replied, "Don't tell Miss Brodie."
"Why not?" said Jenny.
Sandy tried, but could not think why not, except to feel an unfinished quality about Miss Brodie and her holiday at Cramond, and her sending Rose to Mr. Lloyd. So she said, "The policewoman said to try to forget what happened. Perhaps Miss Brodie would make you remember it."
Jenny said, "That's what I think, too."
And so they forgot the man by the Water of Leith and remembered the policewoman more and more as the term wore on.
During the last few months of Miss Brodie's teaching she made herself adorable. She did not exhort or bicker and even when hard pressed was irritable only with Mary Macgregor. That spring she monopolised with her class the benches under the elm from which could be seen an endless avenue of dark pink May trees, and heard the trotting of horses in time to the turning wheels of light carts returning home empty by a hidden lane from their early morning rounds. Not far off, like a promise of next year, a group of girls from the Senior school were doing first-form Latin. Once, the Latin mistress was moved by the spring of the year to sing a folksong to fit the clip-clop of the ponies and carts, and Miss Brodie held up her index finger with delight so that her own girls should listen too.

[Dorothy Zbornak]

Nundinarum adest dies, Mulus ille nos vehet Eie, curre, mule, mule, I tolutari gradu.
That spring Jenny's mother was expecting a baby, there was no rain worth remembering, the grass, the sun and the birds lost their self-centred winter mood and began to think of others. Miss Brodie's old love story was newly embroidered, under the elm, with curious threads: it appeared that while on leave from the war, her late fiancé had frequently taken her out sailing in a fishing boat and that they had spent some of their merriest times among the rocks and pebbles of a small seaport. "Sometimes Hugh would sing, he had a rich tenor voice. At other times he fell silent and would set up his easel and paint. He was very talented at both arts, but I think the painter was the real Hugh."
This was the first time the girls had heard of Hugh's artistic leanings. Sandy puzzled over this and took counsel with Jenny, and it came to them both that Miss Brodie was making her new love story fit the old. Thereafter the two girls listened with double ears, and the rest of the class with single.
Sandy was fascinated by this method of making patterns with facts, and was divided between her admiration for the technique and the pressing need to prove Miss Brodie guilty of misconduct.
"What about those incriminating documents?" said Sergeant Anne Grey in her jolly friendly manner. She really was very thrilling.
Sandy and Jenny completed the love correspondence between Miss Brodie and the singing master at half-term. They were staying in the small town of Crail on the coast of Fife with Jenny's aunt who showed herself suspicious of their notebook; and so they took it off to a neighbouring village along the coast by bus, and sat at the mouth of a cave to finish the work. It had been a delicate question how to present Miss Brodie in both a favourable and an unfavourable light, for now, as their last term with Miss Brodie drew to a close, nothing less than this was demanded.
That intimacy had taken place was to be established. But not on an ordinary bed. That had been a thought suitable only for the enlivening of a sewing period, but Miss Brodie was entitled to something like a status. They placed Miss Brodie on the lofty lion's back of Arthur's Seat, with only the sky for roof and bracken for a bed. The broad parkland rolled away beneath her gaze to the accompanying flash and crash of a thunderstorm. It was here that Gordon Lowther, shy and smiling, small, with a long body and short legs, his red-gold hair and moustache, found her.
"Took her," Jenny had said when they had first talked it over.
"Took her — well, no. She gave herself to him."
"She gave herself to him," Jenny said, "although she would fain have given herself to another."
The last letter in the series, completed at mid-term, went as follows:
My Own Delightful Gordon,
Your letter has moved me deeply as you may imagine. But alas, I must ever decline to be Mrs. Lowther. My reasons are twofold. I am dedicated to my Girls as is Madame Pavlova, and there is another in my life whose mutual love reaches out to me beyond the bounds of Time and Space. He is Teddy Lloyd! Intimacy has never taken place with him. He is married to another. One day in the art room we melted into each other's arms and knew the truth. But I was proud of giving myself to you when you came and took me in the bracken on Arthur's Seat while the storm raged about us. If I am in a certain condition I shall place the infant in the care of a worthy shepherd and his wife, and we can discuss it calmly as platonic acquaintances. I may permit misconduct to occur again from time to time as an outlet because I am in my Prime. We can also have many a breezy day in the fishing boat at sea.
I wish to inform you that your housekeeper fills me with anxiety like John Knox. I fear she is rather narrow, which arises from an ignorance of culture and the Italian scene. Pray ask her not to say, "You know your way up," when I call at your house at Cramond. She should take me up and show me in. Her knees are not stiff. She is only pretending that they are.
I love to hear you singing "Hey Johnnie Cope." But were I to receive a proposal of marriage tomorrow from the Lord Lyon King of Arms I would decline it. Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing.
With fondest joy, Jean Brodie.
When they had finished writing this letter they read the whole correspondence from beginning to end. They were undecided then whether to cast this incriminating document out to sea or to bury it. The act of casting things out to sea from the shore was, as they knew, more difficult than it sounded. But Sandy found a damp hole half-hidden by a stone at the back of the cave and they pressed into it the notebook containing the love correspondence of Miss Jean Brodie, and never saw it again. They walked back to Crail over the very springy turf full of fresh plans and fondest joy.
4
"I have enough gunpowder in this jar to blow up this school," said Miss Lockhart in even tones.
She stood behind her bench in her white linen coat, with both hands on a glass jar three-quarters full of a dark grey powder. The extreme hush that fell was only what she expected, for she always opened the first science lesson with these words and with the gunpowder before her, and the first science lesson was no lesson at all, but a naming of the most impressive objects in the science room. Every eye was upon the jar. Miss Lockhart lifted it and placed it carefully in a cupboard which was filled with similar jars full of different-coloured crystals and powders.
"These are bunsen burners, this is a test-tube, this is a pipette, that's a burette, that is a retort, a crucible..."
Thus she established her mysterious priesthood. She was quite the nicest teacher in the Senior school. But they were all the nicest teachers in the school. It was a new life altogether, almost a new school. Here were no gaunt mistresses like Miss Gaunt, those many who had stalked past Miss Brodie in the corridors saying "good morning" with predestination in their smiles. The teachers here seemed to have no thoughts of anyone's personalities apart from their speciality in life, whether it was mathematics, Latin or science. They treated the new first-formers as if they were not real, but only to be dealt with, like symbols of algebra, and Miss Brodie's pupils found this refreshing at first. Wonderful, too, during the first week was the curriculum of dazzling new subjects, and the rushing to and from room to room to keep to the time-table. Their days were now filled with unfamiliar shapes and sounds which were magically dissociated from ordinary life, the great circles and triangles of geometry, the hieroglyphics of Greek on the page and the curious hisses and spits some of the Greek sounds made from the teacher's lips — "psst... psooch..."
A few weeks later, when meanings appeared from among these sights and sounds, it was difficult to remember the party-game effect of that first week, and that Greek had ever made hisses and spits or that "mensarum" had sounded like something out of nonsense verse. The Modern side, up to the third form, was distinguished from the Classical only by modern or ancient languages. The girls on the Modern side were doing German and Spanish, which, when rehearsed between periods, made the astonishing noises of foreign stations got in passing on the wireless. A mademoiselle with black frizzy hair, who wore a striped shirt with real cuff-links, was pronouncing French in a foreign way which never really caught on. The science room smelt unevenly of the Canongate on that day of the winter's walk with Miss Brodie, the bunsen burners, and the sweet autumnal smoke that drifted in from the first burning leaves. Here in the science room — strictly not to be referred to as a laboratory — lessons were called experiments, which gave everyone the feeling that not even Miss Lockhart knew what the result might be, and anything might occur between their going in and coming out and the school might blow up.
Here, during that first week, an experiment was conducted which involved magnesium in a test-tube which was made to tickle a bunsen flame. Eventually, from different parts of the room, great white magnesium flares shot out of the test-tubes and were caught in larger glass vessels which waited for the purpose. Mary Macgregor took fright and ran along a single lane between two benches, met with a white flame, and ran back to meet another brilliant tongue of fire. Hither and thither she ran in panic between the benches until she was caught and induced to calm down, and she was told not to be so stupid by Miss Lockhart, who already had learnt the exasperation of looking at Mary's face, its two eyes, nose and mouth, with nothing more to say about it.
Once, in later years, when Sandy was visited by Rose Stanley, and they fell to speaking of dead Mary Macgregor, Sandy said, "When any ill befalls me I wish I had been nicer to Mary."
"How were we to know?" said Rose.
And Miss Brodie, sitting in the window of the Braid Hills Hotel with Sandy, had said: "I wonder if it was Mary Macgregor betrayed me? Perhaps I should have been kinder to Mary."
The Brodie set might easily have lost its identity at this time, not only because Miss Brodie had ceased to preside over their days which were now so brisk with the getting of knowledge from unsoulful experts, but also because the headmistress intended them to be dispersed.
She laid a scheme and it failed. It was too ambitious, it aimed at ridding the school of Miss Brodie and breaking up the Brodie set in the one stroke.

[Dorothy Zbornak]

She befriended Mary Macgregor, thinking her to be gullible and bribable, and underrating her stupidity. She remembered that Mary had, in common with all Miss Brodie's girls, applied to go on the Classical side, but had been refused. Now Miss Mackay changed her mind and allowed her to take at least Latin. In return she expected to be informed concerning Miss Brodie. But as the only reason that Mary had wanted to learn Latin was to please Miss Brodie, the headmistress got no further. Give the girl tea as she might, Mary simply did not understand what was required of her and thought all the teachers were in league together, Miss Brodie and all.
"You won't be seeing much of Miss Brodie," said Miss Mackay, "now that you are in the Senior school."
"I see," said Mary, taking the remark as an edict rather than a probing question.
Miss Mackay laid another scheme and the scheme undid her. There was a highly competitive house system in the Senior school, whose four houses were named Holyrood, Melrose, Argyll and Biggar.
Miss Mackay saw to it that the Brodie girls were as far as possible placed in different houses. Jenny was put in Holyrood, Sandy with Mary Macgregor in Melrose, Monica and Eunice went into Argyll and Rose Stanley into Biggar. They were therefore obliged to compete with each other in every walk of life within the school and on the wind-swept hockey fields which lay like the graves of the martyrs exposed to the weather in an outer suburb. It was the team spirit, they were told, that counted now, every house must go all out for the Shield and turn up on Saturday mornings to yell encouragement to the house. Interhouse friendships must not suffer, of course, but the team spirit...
This phrase was enough for the Brodie set who, after two years at Miss Brodie's, had been well directed as to its meaning.
"Phrases like 'the team spirit' are always employed to cut across individualism, love and personal loyalties," she had said. "Ideas like 'the team spirit,'" she said, "ought not to be enjoined on the female sex, especially if they are of that dedicated nature whose virtues from time immemorial have been utterly opposed to the concept. Florence Nightingale knew nothing of the team spirit, her mission was to save life regardless of the team to which it belonged. Cleopatra knew nothing of the team spirit if you read your Shakespeare. Take Helen of Troy. And the Queen of England, it is true she attends international sport, but she has to, it is all empty show, she is concerned only with the King's health and antiques. Where would the team spirit have got Sybil Thorndike? — She is the great actress and the rest of the cast have got the team spirit. Pavlova..."
Perhaps Miss Brodie had foreseen this moment of the future when her team of six should be exposed to the appeal of four different competing spirits, Argyll, Melrose, Biggar and Holyrood. It was impossible to know how much Miss Brodie planned by deliberation, or how much she worked by instinct alone. However, in this, the first test of her strength, she had the victory. Not one of the senior house-prefects personified an argument to touch Sybil Thorndike and Cleopatra. The Brodie set would as soon have entered the Girl Guides as the team spirit. Not only they, but at least ten other girls who had passed through Brodie hands kept away from the playing grounds except under compulsion. No one, save Eunice Gardiner, got near to being put in any team to try her spirit upon. Everyone agreed that Eunice was so good on the field, she could not help it.
On most Saturday afternoons Miss Brodie entertained her old set to tea and listened to their new experiences. Herself, she told them, she did not think much of her new pupils' potentialities, and she described some of her new little girls and made the old ones laugh, which bound her set together more than ever and made them feel chosen. Sooner or later she enquired what they were doing in the art class, for now the girls were taught by golden-locked, one-armed Teddy Lloyd.
There was always a great deal to tell about the art lesson. Their first day, Mr. Lloyd found difficulty in keeping order. After so many unfamiliar packed hours and periods of different exact subjects, the girls immediately felt the relaxing nature of the art room, and brimmed over with relaxation. Mr. Lloyd shouted at them in his hoarse voice to shut up. This was most bracing.
He was attempting to explain the nature and appearance of an ellipse by holding up a saucer in his one right hand, high above his head, then lower. But his romantic air and his hoarse "Shut up" had produced a reaction of giggles varying in tone and pitch.
"If you girls don't shut up I'll smash this saucer to the floor," he said.
They tried but failed to shut up.
He smashed the saucer to the floor.
Amid the dead silence which followed he picked on Rose Stanley and indicating the fragments of saucer on the floor, he said, "You with the profile — pick this up."
He turned away and went and did something else at the other end of the long room for the rest of the period, while the girls looked anew at Rose Stanley's profile, marvelled at Mr. Lloyd's style, and settled down to drawing a bottle set up in front of a curtain. Jenny remarked to Sandy that Miss Brodie really had good taste.
"He has an artistic temperament, of course," said Miss Brodie when she was told about the saucer. And when she heard that he had called Rose "you with the profile," she looked at Rose in a special way, while Sandy looked at Miss Brodie.
The interest of Sandy and Jenny in Miss Brodie's lovers had entered a new phase since they had buried their last composition and moved up to the Senior school. They no longer saw everything in a sexual context, it was now rather a question of plumbing the deep heart's core. The world of pure sex seemed years away. Jenny had turned twelve. Her mother had recently given birth to a baby boy, and the event had not moved them even to speculate upon its origin.
"There's not much time for sex research in the Senior school," Sandy said.
"I feel I'm past it," said Jenny. This was strangely true, and she did not again experience her early sense of erotic wonder in life until suddenly one day when she was nearly forty, an actress of moderate reputation married to a theatrical manager. It happened she was standing with a man whom she did not know very well outside a famous building in Rome, waiting for the rain to stop. She was surprised by a reawakening of that same buoyant and airy discovery of sex, a total sensation which it was impossible to say was physical or mental, only that it contained the lost and guileless delight of her eleventh year. She supposed herself to have fallen in love with the man, who might, she thought, have been moved towards her in his own way out of a world of his own, the associations of which were largely unknown to her. There was nothing whatever to be done about it, for Jenny had been contentedly married for sixteen years past; but the concise happening filled her with astonishment whenever it came to mind in later days, and with a sense of the hidden possibilities in all things.

[Dorothy Zbornak]

"Mr. Lowther's housekeeper," said Miss Brodie one Saturday afternoon, "has left him. It is most ungrateful, that house at Cramond is easily run. I never cared for her as you know. I think she resented my position as Mr. Lowther's friend and confidante, and seemed dissatisfied by my visits. Mr. Lowther is composing some music for song at the moment. He ought to be encouraged."
The next Saturday she told the girls that the sewing sisters, Miss Ellen and Miss Alison Kerr, had taken on the temporary task of housekeepers to Mr. Lowther, since they lived near Cramond.
"I think those sisters are inquisitive," Miss Brodie remarked. "They are too much in with Miss Gaunt and the Church of Scotland."
On Saturday afternoons an hour was spent on her Greek lessons, for she had insisted that Jenny and Sandy should teach her Greek at the same time as they learned it. "There is an old tradition for this practice," said Miss Brodie. "Many families in the olden days could afford to send but one child to school, whereupon that one scholar of the family imparted to the others in the evening what he had learned in the morning. I have long wanted to know the Greek language, and this scheme will also serve to impress your knowledge on your own minds. John Stuart Mill used to rise at dawn to learn Greek at the age of five, and what John Stuart Mill could do as an infant at dawn, I too can do on a Saturday afternoon in my prime."
She progressed in Greek, although she was somewhat muddled about the accents, being differently informed by Jenny and Sandy who took turns to impart to her their weekly intake of the language. But she was determined to enter and share the new life of her special girls, and what she did not regard as humane of their new concerns, or what was not within the scope of her influence, she scorned.
She said: "It is witty to say that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, or that a circle is a plane figure bounded by one line, every point of which is equidistant from a fixed centre. It is plain witty. Everyone knows what a straight line and a circle are."
When, after the examinations at the end of the first term, she looked at the papers they had been set, she read some of the more vulnerable of the questions aloud with the greatest contempt: "A window cleaner carries a uniform 60-lb. ladder 15 ft. long, at one end of which a bucket of water weighing 40 lb. is hung. At what point must he support the ladder to carry it horizontally? Where is the c.g. of his load?" Miss Brodie looked at the paper, after reading out this question as if to indicate that she could not believe her eyes. Many a time she gave the girls to understand that the solution to such problems would be quite useless to Sybil Thorndike, Anna Pavlova and the late Helen of Troy.
But the Brodie set were on the whole still dazzled by their new subjects. It was never the same in later years when the languages of physics and chemistry, algebra and geometry had lost their elemental strangeness and formed each an individual department of life with its own accustomed boredom, and become hard work. Even Monica Douglas, who later developed such a good brain for mathematics, was plainly never so thrilled with herself as when she first subtracted x from y and the result from a; she never afterwards looked so happy.
Rose Stanley sliced a worm down the middle with the greatest absorption during her first term's biology, although in two terms' time she shuddered at the thought and had dropped the subject. Eunice Gardiner discovered the Industrial Revolution, its rights and wrongs, to such an extent that the history teacher, a vegetarian communist, had high hopes of her which were dashed within a few months when Eunice reverted to reading novels based on the life of Mary Queen of Scots. Sandy, whose handwriting was bad, spent hours forming the Greek characters in neat rows in her notebooks while Jenny took the same pride in drawing scientific apparatus for her chemistry notes. Even stupid Mary Macgregor amazed herself by understanding Caesar's Gallic Wars which as yet made no demands on her defective imagination and the words of which were easier to her than English to spell and pronounce, until suddenly one day it appeared, from an essay she had been obliged to write, that she believed the document to date from the time of Samuel Pepys; and then Mary was established in the wrong again, being tortured with probing questions, and generally led on to confess to the mirth-shaken world her notion that Latin and shorthand were one.
Miss Brodie had a hard fight of it during those first few months when the Senior school had captivated her set, displaying as did the set that capacity for enthusiasm which she herself had implanted. But having won the battle over the team spirit, she did not despair. It was evident even then that her main concern was lest the girls should become personally attached to any one of the senior teachers, but she carefully refrained from direct attack because the teachers themselves seemed so perfectly indifferent to her brood.
By the summer term, the girls' favourite hours were those spent unbrainfully in the gymnasium, swinging about on parallel bars, hanging upside down on wall bars or climbing ropes up to the ceiling, all competing with agile Eunice to heave themselves up by hands, knees, and feet like monkeys climbing a tropical creeper, while the gym teacher, a thin grey-haired little wire, showed them what to do and shouted each order in a broad Scots accent interspersed by her short cough, on account of which she was later sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland.
By the summer term, to stave off the onslaughts of boredom, and to reconcile the necessities of the working day with their love for Miss Brodie, Sandy and Jenny had begun to apply their new-found knowledge to Miss Brodie in a merry fashion. "If Miss Brodie was weighed in air and then in water..." And, when Mr. Lowther seemed not quite himself at the singing lesson, they would remind each other that an immersed Jean Brodie displaces its own weight of Gordon Lowther.
Presently, in the late spring of nineteen-thirty-three, Miss Brodie's Greek lessons on a Saturday afternoon came to an end, because of the needs of Mr. Lowther who, in his house at Cramond which the girls had not yet seen, was being catered for quite willingly by those sewing mistresses, Miss Ellen and Miss Alison Kerr. Living on the coast nearby, it was simple for them to go over turn by turn and see to Mr. Lowther after school hours, and prepare his supper and lay out provision for his breakfast; it was not only simple, it was enjoyable to be doing good, and it was also profitable in a genteel way. On Saturdays either Miss Ellen or Miss Alison would count his laundry and keep house for him. On some Saturday mornings both were busy for him; Miss Ellen supervised the woman who came to clean while Miss Alison did the week's shopping. They never had been so perky or useful in their lives before, and especially not since the eldest sister had died, who had always told them what to do with their spare time as it cropped up, so that Miss Alison could never get used to being called Miss Kerr and Miss Ellen could never find it in her to go and get a book from the library, wanting the order from the late Miss Kerr.
But the minister's sister, gaunt Miss Gaunt, was secretly taking over the dead sister's office. As it became known later, Miss Gaunt approved of their arrangement with Gordon Lowther and encouraged them to make it a permanent one for their own good and also for private reasons connected with Miss Brodie.
Up to now, Miss Brodie's visits to Mr. Lowther had taken place on Sundays. She always went to church on Sunday mornings, she had a rota of different denominations and sects which included the Free Churches of Scotland, the Established Church of Scotland, the Methodist and the Episcopalian churches and any other church outside the Roman Catholic pale which she might discover. Her disapproval of the Church of Rome was based on her assertions that it was a church of superstition, and that only people who did not want to think for themselves were Roman Catholics. In some ways, her attitude was a strange one, because she was by temperament suited only to the Roman Catholic Church; possibly it could have embraced, even while it disciplined, her soaring and diving spirit, it might even have normalised her. But perhaps this was the reason that she shunned it, lover of Italy though she was, bringing to her support a rigid Edinburgh-born side of herself when the Catholic Church was in question, although this side was not otherwise greatly in evidence. So she went round the various non-Roman churches instead, hardly ever missing a Sunday morning. She was not in any doubt, she let everyone know she was in no doubt, that God was on her side whatever her course, and so she experienced no difficulty or sense of hypocrisy in worship while at the same time she went to bed with the singing master. Just as an excessive sense of guilt can drive people to excessive action, so was Miss Brodie driven to it by an excessive lack of guilt.