June 20, 19 1 8 
Land & Water 
17 
The Motor Class : By Enid Bagnold 
V 
THE lecturer wore a tail coat and was covered 
with blotches of chalk from head to foot. 'He 
had blue, pale eyes fitted into two hollows 
in his head, and he held a very small pipe upside 
down between his teeth, so that I used to wonder 
why everything that was in it did not fall down upon the 
floor. 
He loved chalk, and held three pieces of different colours 
in each hand, as well as a yard measure, and often another 
piece was in his lips beside the stem of the pipe. Though he 
was quite small he ma4e a great deal of noise, and even 
whistled as he drew upon the blackboard, shrill for the 
upstrokes, deep and low for the downstrokes, and for a circle 
he could scoop his tongue round in his mouth and make 
a circular noise. 
Perhaps he never got enough exercise, for he seemed to 
try to get what he could within the limits of the class- 
room, jumping upon the sill of the window like a cat if there 
was a window to be opened, or if the gas was to be turned 
on he sprang about among the pipes and bare bones of the 
motor-chassis that stood in the centre of the room, and reached 
for the chains that hung from the tap. 
He was our little god, and taught us how an engine works. 
Before the class started we all sat in a half-moon about 
the chassis, and being on the whole dull-looking women, 
got up in raincoats as though we meant to be armed for a 
perpetual rainy day, we made dull confidences to each other, 
and spoke about April as though she were a month of ill- 
fame, and nothing much could be expected of her. 
Some of us listened to a lady with a pretty powdered 
nose, and a small, strained mouth full of gold teeth. She 
had a tale to tell. 
" I found her asleep, on the floor. Snoring ! With crumbs 
from an old newspaper beside her ! It ought to be stopped !" 
"Disgusting !" 
"... and a black cat sitting in the basin. Actually in the 
basin when I wanted to wash my hands ! I had to lift her 
out." 
She was speaking of our cloakroom in which 'hung twelve 
times as many oily overalls as there were pegs to hold them, 
and of the cloakroom's charwoman who could find no softer 
place to lay her head than under the shadow Of the overalls. 
"That's where democracy leads you," said the lady, 
speaking either of the black cat or of the charwoman, 
"straight to dirt." ' 
But the lecturer came in at a gallop, and her thin voice 
fell to a thinner whisper. The door shut after him at a touch 
of his flying foot, he took the naked chassis at a boimd, 
struck the blackboard a broadside with his yard measure, 
and the lady jumped and let all her silver luggage slide out 
of her lap. 
As he had eyes in the back of his head he roared at her : 
"Don't leave the silver about! Somebody'!! take it. 
Somebody always does take it. Seen the convictions ?" 
He referred to the left hand wall of the cloakroom, where 
the space over the basin, the home of the black cat, was 
filled in with the newspaper accounts of convictions for 
thefts. 
"...she was the daughter" the worst of them ran, 
"of a retired doctor, and her father led her from the court 
in tears." 
The lecturer made passes in the air, with his right hand 
full of chalks, and the carburettor began to blossom like 
a hot-house plant upon the blackboard. 
"Thieves," he shouted, so close to the board that he blew 
chalk up his nose, "in a garage," — he paused, a feed-pipe 
flew from one comer of the board to another, "abound!" 
he finished, looking at us threateningly over one shoulder. 
"Begins by taking screws. Goes on to spanners. Goes 
on to spare parts. Thin end of the wedge. Man . . . 
adaptable creature. Spare parts to tyres.. (There's your 
complete thief I) After tyres they'll take anything. You 
leave that silver about . . . there's no knowing . . . might 
take it yourself !" 
He swung away from the bl?rckboard and showed us the 
finished drawing, crossed and checked in red and blue. 
We gazed, delighted, dropping the contemplation of each 
other's minds, brooches, fringes, silk or cotton stockings, 
and leaned towards him, waiting for his fiist question, as 
a dog leaves a dry bone to quiver at a live rat. 
But one amongst us has leaned too far, and she is seized 
by his blue eyes, fired at with his yard measure, shot dumb 
by the violence of his question, and, sitting in that glare 
of publicity, would give her soul to answer and cannot. 
' But could not I ? 
Ah, if he would but ask me I might crown myself with 
glory, speaking slowly, once sure of his permission, adding 
tags of knowledge to my sentence, that I may show him, 
and show them all, how I have understood him ! 
Fame, if he will only shift those blue, attentive eyes from 
the dumb face of the girl who doesn't know. And I lean 
forward, alive with knowledge, my right hand lifting and 
falling in my lap, as though it would shoot in a mute ex- 
clamation above my head 
Has there been a gap of years ? 
What of that other class, those other classes ? The room 
filled with little girls in. white viyella shirts, each with a wrist 
watch, and a gold chain around her neck, the hot sunshine 
at the window washing the pale canary paler till he burns 
with a white light . . . 
It is the same room, and the lecturer's face softens, and 
under the lecturer's chin is a large, soft bow with tiny spots 
upon it, and a fold of lawn over the edge of the collar. It is 
the science mistress, at work upon her board with a duster. 
The science mistress who will not move her eyes, but keeps 
them flfxed in a long, intolerable question upon the empty 
face of such a dunce while in that classroom there is another 
little girl, fat, pig-tailed, leaning so far upon her desk that 
her body seems almost sawn asunder, whose tongue is mute 
because she hasn't yet received the look that can set it going, 
but whose two eyes, popping out of her face, irnplore ardently, 
"Ask me ! O ask me, for I know !" 
How many times, little girl, you swore to yourself that 
if you couldn't get the better of them by subtler means 
you would learn to keep your knowledge for your own 
savouring, and never again use it for be-dazzlement ? And 
when you had given yourself away a hundred times, and were 
in despair, haven't you thought, "One day I shall grow 
up, and change, and mystery and dignity will clothe me, 
and I shall become impenetrable." 
O little girl, you thought you could change your spots . . . 
Who is this then, sitting in my wooden chair, clothed in my 
grown-up, complicated clothes, leaning forward in the same 
attitude, thrusting her head a foot out among the thirty 
grown-up girls, her eyes bright with a piece of knowledge 
which she is inwardly phrasing and rephrasifig until it shall 
astonish and dazzle by its aptness, if only ... if only she is 
asked ! 
Who is this, who, knowing to the uttermost comer 
how the carburettor works, has discovered a phrase of such 
bewildering and inverted complexity — and, given the lightest 
signal from the lecturer, flings it straight, a very tumbling 
waterspout of knowledge, causing thirty grown-up girls to 
gape and withhold their admiration in doubt for a second, 
while she herself awaits the beautiful applause ? 
"Our friend here ..." she hears, and the colour is mounting 
in her face, and she is sitting far, far back among her line 
of heads, "... thinks she is very smart." 
It is the little girl again, hot-faced and ashamed, who 
knows the very tone and colour of that reproof, she, who, 
. though formed and polished up, and laden with the jewels 
of her sophistication, has blushed with the same puppyish 
excitement because she has caught the tail end of the solution 
to that puzzle which is puckering the brow of the girl on the 
other side of the chassis. 
Are we not ageless ? Are we not all here ? 
The lecturer has drawn the piston so fa§t upon the black- 
board that it seems to leap in the cylinder, propelled by 
miraculous gas from his flying h^nd. Were I famous, had I 
achieved success, I should have been listening ; but dis- 
gruntled, rebellious, I gaze round the class instead, sitting, 
well-hidden, between my neighbours. I see that we are all 
here. 
There is the head girl in her decent coat and skirt, modest, 
worldly attentions bestowed upon her collar,' the charming 
efficiency of the school blouse lost in a flutter of lace and 
a bright brooch. She has impersonal and yet watchful 
eyes, she is not clever but she is sure ; she makes no friends 
because she is accustomed to the isolation of sovereignty ; 
if she smiles it is hurriedly, remorsefully, as though she had 
little time for itr Only by her steady justice and detach- 
ment can she escape our universal dislike. 
Theife, beyond, are two pretty girls who look about them. 
They are the pretty girls who knew no awkward age, who, 
even at school appeared to keep their eyes ft.\ed on something 
beyond it, who never quite shared our belief that all happiness 
