The Ungloved Hand

Selina had known the answer before her brother's pencil stopped moving, and the mistake she made was saying so.

It came out in the perfectly level voice in which she said everything, and it went across the schoolroom and lay down on the table in front of the two of them, and the second it was gone she understood the whole size of what she had done — that she had been following the sums, that she had in fact been doing them faster than her brother could copy the figures down, which is a thing a woman of seven and twenty does not do at all, and certainly does not do aloud, and above all does not do in front of a man engaged at forty pounds a year who dines at the servants' table and has ears.

She had been given eight weeks in that room to learn better. She had had eleven minutes.

It had begun, as arrangements at Cleyswood generally began, with the room.

The schoolroom at Cleyswood had been a still-room in her grandfather's time and had never entirely forgiven the promotion. It stood at the end of the north passage with a lumber closet on one side of it and the back stairs on the other, and it looked out over a stretch of gravel, a laurel that wanted cutting, and three fields of somebody else's barley; and it could be seen into from no other window in the house. Selina had established this fact at fifteen and had made considerable use of it for a year or two afterwards, in the article of novels. It was, her father had observed at breakfast, precisely the difficulty. A man was coming into the house to teach Ambrose, and the room in which he would do it was overlooked by nothing whatever, and there were no women at Cleyswood now but herself and the servants, and therefore — he had said therefore with the mild finality of a man laying down a card he did not much like the look of himself — therefore she would sit in.

"For how long?" she had asked.

"Eight weeks. Ten. Until the thing has stopped being a novelty in the parish."

Eight weeks. Not the man's engagement — that ran until Ambrose went up, which meant the spring — but her own attendance, which her father proposed to price at eight weeks and did not propose to discuss. She had reckoned it in her head while he buttered his toast: eight weeks of mornings, which was the summer entire, spent in a converted still-room watching her brother be wrong about arithmetic. She had said nothing. Miss Ottershaw was known in the neighbourhood for bearing things well, and there was no sense in unsettling the neighbourhood.

She went up at a quarter before eleven with her workbox, because a workbox settles the question of what a woman is doing in a room, and took the chair in the window bay, which put her at the tutor's back and the light on her side of the argument. Ellen had done her hair at eight, an hour of it, pins and papers and the tongs heated in the grate, and Selina had sat under her hands and looked at the ceiling and thought about nothing. There was a great deal of it to do. It was dark red, which was the one thing about her that strangers ever remarked upon and always in the same three words; unpinned it came down past her waist, and pinned it had to be persuaded into looking like less than it was. She could not have said, now, what colour ribbon had gone into it. It went up every morning of her life and came down every night of it, and in the eight weeks before her there would be fifty-six such mornings, and she had a fair notion by now what the whole apparatus was for, and it was not for the north passage.

Ambrose came in at two minutes before eleven at a run, with his collar up and his hair standing off his crown in the place it always stood off, and put his elbows on the long table.

"He has a broken nose," he said.

"You have seen him?"

"Wicken had him in the hall. He came by the carrier from the Bell and walked up with his own box on his shoulder, and Wicken offered him the boy and he would not have him." Ambrose was radiant with it. "He walked up. Three miles. With his box."

"Then he will want his breakfast, and you will want your slate, and neither of you will get either by standing about the hall telling Wicken your business."

He fetched the slate. She opened the workbox, looked at the state of the inside of it — a hem she had begun in February and had done four inches of — and shut it again, and set it on the sill, and folded her hands.

Lieutenant Crale came in at eleven exactly.

She had been given to understand that he was a naval officer, and she had allowed herself, without particularly attending to it, the picture the words made: something long and dark and consumptive-looking in a blue coat, the sort of man who is painted leaning on a gun with his hair blowing. What came in was none of it. He was not tall. He was built through the shoulders and the chest like something meant to take weight, and he wore a plain blue coat gone shiny at the cuff and a neckcloth tied without the least interest in the result, and his hair was sandy and cut short and did nothing at all. His face was red — not with the colour of a man who has run upstairs, but the deep weathered red of a surface that has been out of doors for twenty-five years and has stopped pretending it will recover — and it was freckled across the nose, and the nose had been broken and set by somebody in a hurry, and the whole arrangement was, she thought, in the flat way she thought most things, entirely unbeautiful.

He looked at her once, in the moment before he spoke. It was not a long look and there was nothing in it to object to, and it was not in the least the look she was used to, which went to the top of her head and away again. He took her in as he had taken the room: the whole of it, at one time, and then done with. What there was to take in was a tall woman of seven and twenty sitting very upright in the window bay with the shut workbox on the sill beside her; the dark red hair pinned flat and smooth; grey eyes set wide apart, and a wide mouth, in a face that had never freckled and had never coloured either; and under a good deal of white muslin the arms and the shoulders and the waist of a young lady who had been kept indoors and fed four times a day since the day she was born and had never lifted anything heavier than the harp. Soft, and full, and entirely unexercised. She was aware of the whole of that inventory being taken, and of how little time it had cost him.

"Miss Ottershaw." He bowed. He did not do it well and he did not do it badly; he did it the way a man salutes a quarterdeck, because it is done.

"Mr Crale."

"Lieutenant, ma'am, if it is all one to you. It is the only thing I have got out of the war and I am attached to it."

"Lieutenant Crale, then." She inclined her head. "My brother, Ambrose. I am to sit in the window. You need not attend to me."

"No, ma'am," he said, and went to the table, and attended to Ambrose.

He had a low voice and a Portsmouth flatness in it that he had never troubled to sand off, and he did not begin with any of the observations the last man had begun with — not the boy's age, nor the Navy, nor how much depended upon it, nor the weather. He said: "Do a sum for me and let me see where you are." And he set one down, and turned the paper round, and put the pencil into Ambrose's hand himself, which the last man had not done.

Selina looked out of the window at the laurel.

It was a long division. She heard the pencil go, and stop, and go, and stop, and she knew from the shape of the stopping that her brother had lost his place in the second figure, as he always did, because he could not hold two things in his head while a third was going on. She heard the lieutenant say, without any impatience whatever, "Set it out again with more room. You are crowding it. A man cannot work in a space he cannot get his hand into."

"It is only a sum."

"It is a ship's day's work in little," said Crale, "and I have known a midshipman put his ship on Ushant for want of a wide enough sheet of paper. Set it out again."

Ambrose set it out again. Selina discovered that she had turned her head from the window and had been watching the top of her brother's cowlick and the two red hands flat on the table on either side of the paper for some minutes together, and she returned her eyes to the laurel.

They got through two more, badly. It was not that Ambrose was stupid. It was that he had been told at nine, by a man with a mild voice and a bad cold, that he had no head for figures, and had believed him, as boys do, and had been proving him right ever since with a kind of relief. Selina had watched three tutors accept this without examination. This one did not seem to have been told.

"Once more," said Crale. "Seven thousand four hundred and nineteen by twenty-three."

The pencil went. The pencil stopped.

"Three hundred and twenty-two, and thirteen over," said Selina.

Ambrose said, "Selina, don't," in the tone of a boy whose sister has told the end of a story.

She sat perfectly still.

There was, she had learned early, precisely one advantage in a complexion that never in its life had had the civility to rise. Her cousins had blushed scarlet at eleven over nothing, and had gone on blushing through two seasons at whatever anybody chose to say to them, and had been thought delightful for it. Selina's skin gave nothing. It was a flat fine white in a hot room and a flat fine white in a cold one, and it had been reporting nothing whatever for twenty-seven years while people who had not looked at her at all called her composed. She sat with her hands in her lap and her face perfectly at liberty and she was aware of her own pulse in her ears, and of the fact that the room was smaller than it had been, and of the barley going over in a long wave in the third field, and she said nothing, because there was nothing to be said that would not be worse than the silence.

Lieutenant Crale did not turn round.

He said, "Set it down, Mr Ottershaw," and Ambrose set it down; and then he picked up his own pencil and wrote the sum out again himself, at the head of a clean sheet, in a hand she could see even at that distance was small and upright and dreadfully legible, and said, "Now. Your sister has given you the answer, which is of no use to you whatever, because the answer is not the work. Show me how she came by it."

"How am I to know how she came by it?"

"By doing it. Then you will know, and you may correct her, which I recommend to you as one of the pleasures of the profession."

She thought — but she was not going to be certain of it, and she had her whole face to keep in order, and she was not going to look — she thought that something happened at the side of his mouth.

He came round the end of the table to fetch the ruler.

It took him perhaps four seconds. He took the ruler off the shelf by the door and came back and laid the fresh sheet down in front of Ambrose, and squared it with two fingers, and turned it — not much; a hand's breadth; the sort of adjustment a man makes to bring a thing under the light — so that the sum sat canted toward the window bay. Toward the light. Toward the light, and the chair in it, and the woman in the chair, who from where she sat could now read every figure on it without moving her head so much as an inch.

He did not look at her while he did it. He said, "That is better for the light," which was true, and went back round the table.

Selina looked at the laurel that wanted cutting.

She was aware of a number of things at once, in the way one is aware of the weather at sea before one is aware of having looked at the sky. She was aware that a man she had known for eleven minutes had watched her supply a figure she had had no business supplying and had declined, publicly and at some trouble to himself, to make a single remark upon it; that he had put it to work instead; that he had then, without one word that could be repeated in any drawing room in the county, arranged the paper so that she might go on doing it. She was aware that this was a small thing, and that small things were the only ones she was ever offered. She was aware that in eight weeks there would be a great many of them.

And she was aware — sitting composed in the window with her hands folded and her unopened workbox on the sill beside her, and her hair up, and her face saying nothing at all, as it never had — that for the first time in some years, quite possibly for the first time since she was nineteen and in London and being looked at by a great many people who were not looking at her, somebody in a room had seen her arrive at something and had wanted to know how she had got there.

"Again," said Lieutenant Crale to her brother. "And take your time about it. We have the morning."

They had, she thought, rather more than the morning. They had eight weeks.

She left the workbox shut.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

Get the e-book