There was a halt, the piano stopped. The boys who were just
starting through the other door, pushed back. The harsh, subdued
voice of Mr. Brunt was heard, then the booming shout of Mr.
Harby, from far down the room: "Who told Standard Five girls to come in like that?"
Ursula crimsoned. Her girls were glancing up at her, smirking
their accusation.
"I sent them in, Mr. Harby," she said, in a clear, struggling
voice. There was a moment of silence. Then Mr. Harby roared from
the distance.
"Go back to your places, Standard Five girls."
The girls glanced up at Ursula, accusing, rather jeering,
fugitive. They pushed back. Ursula's heart hardened with
ignominious pain.
"Forward--march," came Mr. Brunt's voice, and the girls
set off, keeping time with the ranks of boys.
Ursula faced her class, some fifty-five boys and girls, who
stood filling the ranks of the desks. She felt utterly
nonexistent. She had no place nor being there. She faced the
block of children.
Down the room she heard the rapid firing of questions. She
stood before her class not knowing what to do. She waited
painfully. Her block of children, fifty unknown faces, watched
her, hostile, ready to jeer. She felt as if she were in torture
over a fire of faces. And on every side she was naked to them.
Of unutterable length and torture the seconds went by.
Then she gathered courage. She heard Mr. Brunt asking
questions in mental arithmetic. She stood near to her class, so
that her voice need not be raised too much, and faltering,
uncertain, she said: "Seven hats at twopence ha'penny each?"
A grin went over the faces of the class, seeing her commence.
She was red and suffering. Then some hands shot up like blades,
and she asked for the answer.
The day passed incredibly slowly. She never knew what to do,
there came horrible gaps, when she was merely exposed to the
children; and when, relying on some pert little girl for
information, she had started a lesson, she did not know how to
go on with it properly. The children were her masters. She
deferred to them. She could always hear Mr. Brunt. Like a
machine, always in the same hard, high, inhuman voice he went on
with his teaching, oblivious of everything. And before this
inhuman number of children she was always at bay. She could not
get away from it. There it was, this class of fifty collective
children, depending on her for command, for command it hated and
resented. It made her feel she could not breathe: she must
suffocate, it was so inhuman. They were so many, that they were
not children. They were a squadron. She could not speak as she
would to a child, because they were not individual children,
they were a collective, inhuman thing.