The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Chapter 2

The girls rocked with mirth, thinking of one-armed Mr. Lloyd, in his solemnity, striding into school.

The girls rocked with mirth, thinking of one-armed Mr. Lloyd, in his solemnity, striding into school.

Jenny was a reliable source of information, because a girl employed by her father in his grocer shop had recently been found to be pregnant, and Jenny had picked up some fragments of the ensuing fuss.

Having confided her finds to Sandy, they had embarked on a course of research which they called “research,” piecing together clues from remembered conversations illicitly overheard, and passages from the big dictionaries.

Sandy opened the lid of the piano stool and extracted a notebook from between two sheaves of music.

Sandy beseeched him, “I swear to you before all I hold sacred that Miss Brodie has never loved another, and she awaits you below, praying and hoping in her prime..."

“Back, girl!” he cried, “and do not bar my way. Well do I know that yon girl Jenny will report my whereabouts to my mocking erstwhile fiancée. Well do I know that you are both spies sent by her that she might mock. Stand back from the door, I say!”

“Never!” said Sandy, placing her young lithe body squarely in front of the latch and her arm through the bolt.

In the stormy east wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
Over tower’d Camelot.

“There was a pot of white paint and a brush which happened to be standing upon the grassy verge,” replied the Lady of Shalott graciously. “It was left there no doubt by some heedless member of the Unemployed.”

Miss Brodie ushered the girls from the music room and, gathering them about her, said, “You girls are my vocation. If I were to receive a proposal of marriage tomorrow from the Lord Lyon King-of-Arms I would decline it. I am dedicated to you in my prime. Form a single file, now, please, and walk with your heads up, up like Sybil Thorndike, a woman of noble mien.”

“Yes,” said Miss Brodie, “I have my eye upon you, Sandy. I observe a frivolous nature. I fear you will never belong to life’s elite or, as one might say, the crème de la crème.”

Rose Stanley went to the science room with her inky blouse only because she was bored, but Sandy and Jenny got ink on their blouses at discreet intervals of four weeks, so that they could go and have their arms held by Miss Lockhart who seemed to carry six inches of pure air around her person wherever she moved in that strange-smelling room.

Miss Lockhart in the science room was to Sandy something apart, surrounded by three lanes of long benches set out with jars half-full of coloured crystals and powders and liquids, ochre and bronze and metal grey and cobalt blue, glass vessels of curious shapes, bulbous, or with pipe-like stems.

Miss Brodie had already selected her favourites, or rather those whom she could trust; or rather those whose parents she could trust not to lodge complaints about the more advanced and seditious aspects of her educational policy, these parents being either too enlightened to complain or too unenlightened...

But eventually she cut capers for the relief and amusement of the tea-parties, doing cart-wheels on the carpet.

She was not allowed to do cart-wheels on Sundays, for in many ways Miss Brodie was an Edinburgh spinster of the deepest dye.

“Sandy won’t talk to me,” said Mary who later, in that hotel fire, ran hither and thither till she died.

“Sandy won’t talk to me,” said Mary who later, in that hotel fire, ran hither and thither till she died.

Sandy kept pacing ahead, fired on by Alan Breck whose ardour and thankfulness, as Sandy prepared to set off across the heather, had reached touching proportions.

But Sandy was walking unevenly, in little spurts forward and little halts, as Alan Breck began to sing to her his ditty before she took to the heather to deliver the message that was going to save Alan’s life.

She perceived herself, the absent Jenny, the ever-blamed Mary, Rose, Eunice and Monica, all in a frightening little moment, in unified compliance to the destiny of Miss Brodie, as if God had willed them to birth for that purpose.

Miss Brodie’s brood, all but Mary, walked past with eyes ahead.

The Canongate, The Grassmarket, The Lawnmarket, were names which betokened a misty region of crime and desperation: “Lawnmarket Man Jailed.”

Sandy had been taken to Holyrood in an uncle’s car and had seen the bed, too short and too broad, where Mary Queen of Scots had slept, and the tiny room, smaller than their own scullery at home, where the Queen had played cards with Rizzio.

So that, in her middle age, when she was at last allowed all those visitors to the convent—so many visitors being against the Rule, but a special dispensation was enforced on Sandy because of her Treatise...

His teachers had been supercilious Englishmen, “or near-Englishmen,” said the visitor, “with third-rate degrees.”

“I once was taken for a walk through the Canon-gate,” Sandy said, “but I was frightened by the squalor.”

But the dispensation was forced upon Sandy, and she clutched the bars and received the choice visitors, the psychologists and the Catholic seekers, and the higher journalist ladies and the academics who wanted to question her about her odd psychological treatise on the nature of moral perception, called “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.”

“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...

“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..."

As for impropriety, it could never be imputed to me except by some gross distortion on the part of a traitor.

As for impropriety, it could never be imputed to me except by some gross distortion on the part of a traitor.

“In England they are called the Unemployed. They are waiting to get their dole from the labour bureau,” said Miss Brodie.

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.