Incredibly soon, so stealthy swift is time, came this
last term of Rosalie’s at the Sultana’s.
Time does not play an open game. It’s of
the cloak and dagger sort. It stalks and pounces.
Rosalie was astonished to think she was leaving; and
now the time had come she was sorry to be going.
Not very sorry; very excited; but having just enough
regret to realise, on looking back, that she had been
very happy at school and to realise, actively, happiness
in this last term. One knows what it is.
It’s always like that. One always was happy;
one so seldom is. Happiness to be realised needs
faint perception of sadness as needs the egg the touch
of salt to manifest its flavour. Flashes of entertainment
may enliven the most wretched of us; but that’s
pleasure; that’s not happiness. One comes
to know the only true and ideal happiness is happiness
tinctured with faintest, vaguest hint of tears.
It is peace; and who knows peace that has not come
to it through storm, or knoweth storm ahead, or in
storm past hath not lost one that would have shared
this peace?
So that girl’s last term was (in her words)
“tremendously jolly.” She was just
eighteen, and she was leaving, and responsive to this
the harness of the school was drawn off her as at the
paddock gate the headstall from a colt. She was
out of lessons. She did some teaching of the
younger girls. She was on terms with the mistresses.
She had the run of Keggo’s room.
Such talks in Keggo’s room.... She was
out from the cove of childhood; she was into the bay
of youth; breasting towards the sea of womanhood (that
sea that’s sailed by stars and by no chart);
and she was encountering tides that come to young mariners
to perplex them and Keggo could talk about such things
with the experience that so enraptures young mariners
and of which young mariners are at the same time so
confidently contemptuous, so superiorly sceptical.
Nearer to press the simile, youth at the feet of experience
is as one, experienced, climbing a mountain with the
young thing panting behind. “Go on!
Go on!” pants the growing young thing. “This
is ripping. Go on. Show the way. But
I don’t want your hand. I can do it easily
by myself—better.” And one evening
while Rosalie stumblingly explained, and eagerly received,
and sceptically doubted, “But look here, Keggo,”
she cried, and stopped and blushed, abashed at her
use of the nickname.
Miss Keggs laughed. “Don’t mind,
Rosalie. Call me Keggo. I like it.
It’s much more friendly. I’m very
fond of you, Rosalie.”
They were by the oil stove, Miss Keggs in her wicker
armchair, Rosalie on the floor, her back propped against
Miss Keggs’s knees. One of Miss Keggs’s
hands was on Rosalie’s shoulder and she moved
it to touch the girl’s face. “Are
you fond of me, Rosalie?”
Rosalie turned towards her and spoke impulsively.
“Oh, awfully—Keggo.”
