Three Girls from School

The girls were all pleased to see her, and when she assured them that she was as well as ever they all congratulated her. Priscilla Weir sat at table near Annie. Priscilla was not looking well. The headache which Annie pretended to have was in reality possessed by poor Priscilla. She was easily startled, too, and changed colour when any one addressed her in a hurry.

Towards the end of the meal, as the girls were about to leave the room, she bent towards Annie and said:

“Is it really true that Mabel Lushington is going to read some poems at four o’clock this afternoon?”

“She is going to read some of her own poems. Why not?” said Annie. She spoke defiantly.

“Her own poems?” echoed Priscilla, a world of scorn in her voice.

“Yes. Why not?” said Annie.

Priscilla was silent for a minute. Then she said in a very low voice:

“I know how clever you are; but even your genius cannot rise to this. I have seen you struggle to make even the slightest rhyme when we have been playing at making up verses. You can’t manage this.”

“Never mind,” said Annie. She jumped up almost rudely. The next minute she had seized Mabel by the arm. “We have half-an-hour. Come with me at once to my room.”

Mabel did so. When they reached the room Annie locked the door.

“Now then,” she said, “who’s a genius? I said I would find a way out. Sit down immediately before my desk and write what I tell you.”

“Oh Annie, what do you mean?”

“I mean exactly what I say, and the fewer questions you ask the better. I will dictate the poem, and you shall copy it.”

“But – but,” said Mabel, turning from red to white – “it isn’t, I hope, from a printed book. I have thought of that I have been so frightfully miserable that I’ve thought of everything; but that would be so terribly unsafe.”

“This is not unsafe at any rate,” said Annie, “Now you begin. Write what I tell you.”

Annie’s look of triumph and her absolutely fearless manner impressed Mabel. She wrote as best she could to Annie’s dictation, and soon two of poor Susan Martin’s attempts at verse were copied in Mabel’s writing.

“There you are!” said Annie. “That ‘sunset’ one will take the cake, and that pretty little one about ‘my favourite cat’ will come home to every one.”

“But I haven’t a favourite cat,” said Mabel, “and why ever should I write about it?”

“Did you never in the whole course of your life,” was Annie’s answer, “hear of a poet’s licence? You can write on anything, you know, if you are a poet.”

“Can I?” replied Mabel. “Then I suppose the cat will do.”

“It will do admirably.”

“I hope,” said Mabel, “they won’t question me afterwards about the animal. It sounds exactly as though it were my own cat, and every one in the school knows that I can’t even touch a cat.”

“What a pity you didn’t tell me that before,” said Annie, “and I would have chosen something else! But there’s no time now; we must fly downstairs immediately.”

“You are clever, Annie. I can’t think how you got these poems. But the ‘sunset’ one sounds dreadful too. I never even looked at a sunset. And then there’s the thoughts about dying – as if – as if I could know anything of that.”

“You must read them as pathetically as you can,” said Annie, “and make the best of a bad job. I believe they’ll go down admirably. Now then, fold them up and put them away; and don’t let’s be found closeted together here.” Sharp at four that afternoon Mabel appeared before her assembled schoolfellows and read – it must be owned rather badly – first some “Lines to a Favourite Cat,” and then “Thoughts on the Sunset.” The poems were not poetry in any sense of the word; nevertheless, there was a vague sort of far-off suggestion of poetry about them. It is true the girls giggled at the thought of Mabel and her cat, and were not specially impressed by the violet and rose tints of the sunset, or by the fact that florid, large, essentially living-looking Mabel should talk of her last faint breath, and of the time when she lay pale and still and was a corse.

She read the lines, however, and they seemed thoroughly genuine. When she had finished she looked at her companions.

“Well, I’d like to say, ‘I’m blowed!’” said Agnes; while Constance Smedley, the head-girl of the school, said in a low tone:

“I congratulate you, Mabel; and I’m very much surprised. There is no saying what you will do in the future, only I hope you won’t speak of dead people as corses, for I dislike the term.”

“And of course after this,” said a merry, round-faced girl who had hitherto not spoken, “we will expect to have further lines on pussie, poor, pussie; and, oh, Mabel, what a cheat you are! And you always said you loathed cats!”

At this instant one of the youngest girls in the school rushed up and flung a tabby-cat into Mabel’s lap. The cat was large; a very rough specimen of the race. Being angry at such treatment, it unsheathed all its claws. Mabel shrieked with terror, and flung the poor animal aside with great vehemence.

“Oh, poor pussie, poor pussie!” laughed the others; “but she loves you all the same.

“When pussy comes, so sleek and warm,
And rubs against my knee,
I think we’re safe from every harm,
My pretty cat and me.

“Oh Mabel, Mabel! you are a humbug.”

“I hate cats!” burst from Mabel.

Annie turned pale for a minute; but her self-composure did not long desert her. “Being a poet, you know, you’re quite certain to be a little mad at times,” she remarked. “All poets are. I suppose you had a mad fit, dear Mabel, when you wrote about your favourite cat. I thought so.”

“I think so, and I think I am mad now,” said Mabel, marching away from the others as she spoke, and plunging into the cool depths of the paddock.

At that moment, more than cats, she hated herself; she hated Annie; she hated Priscilla. What an awful tissue of lies she was weaving round herself! Surely another year at Mrs Lyttelton’s school would have been much better than this. But, alas! it is not given to us to retrace our steps. Mabel had taken up a position, and there was nothing for it now but to abide by it. To confess all that she had done, to demand the money back from Priscilla, to stay on at school, were greater feats than she had courage to perform; and even if she were willing to do this, was not Annie always by her side – Annie, who did not repent, who was feathering her own nest so nicely, and who was priding herself on having overcome the immense difficulty of proving poor, stupid Mabel a poet?

The great day of the prize-giving followed soon after, and, to the unbounded astonishment of the girls, Mabel Lushington’s essay on “Idealism” won the first literature prize.

The essays were not read by the girls themselves, but by one of the teachers who had a beautiful voice and that dear enunciation which makes every word tell. The vote in favour of Mabel was unanimous. Her paper had thought; it had even style. In all respects it was far above the production of an ordinary schoolgirl, and beyond doubt it was far and away the best essay written.

Priscilla’s paper passed muster, but it did not even win the second prize. Mabel looked quite modest and strikingly handsome when the great prize was bestowed upon her – a magnificent edition of all the great English poets, bound in calf and bearing the school coat-of-arms.

Mrs Lyttelton, more astonished than pleased, was nevertheless forced to congratulate Mabel. She turned soon afterwards to one of the girls.

“I must confess,” she said, “that I never was so surprised in my life.”

“I should have been just as amazed as you,” answered Constance, “but for the fact that there is far more in Mabel than any one has the least idea of. She is a poet, you know.”

“A poet, my dear?”

“Yes; indeed she is. We simply would not believe it; but she read us some of her verses. A few, of course, were nothing but drivel; but there were lines on the sunset which quite amazed me, for they were full of thought.”

“I am glad to hear it, Constance; nevertheless, I may as well confess to you that my feelings at the present moment are mingled ones. I wanted Priscilla to win the prize.”

Meanwhile Mabel, surrounded by glory – her schoolfellows and the different visitors who had come to the school for the occasion crowding round her and congratulating her – had no longer any feeling of remorse. She acknowledged that Annie was right, and loved Annie, for the time being, with all her heart.

It was Annie herself who took the telegram to the post-office to convey the great information to Lady Lushington. It was Annie herself who was the happy recipient of the reply which came later on that evening. The words of Lady Lushington’s telegram were brief: