Miss Pym Disposes

by Josephine Tey

Something winked on the floor half-way between her and the boom; something tiny and bright. A nail-head or something, she thought; and then remembered that there were no nailheads in a gymnasium floor. She moved forward, idly curious, and picked the thing up. It was a small filigree rosette, flat, and made of silvery metal; and as she put it absently into her jersey pocket and turned away to continue her walk, she smiled. If the quiver under her sternum this morning had reminded her of school days, that small metal circle brought back even more clearly the parties of her childhood. Almost before her conscious mind had recognised it for what it was she was back in the atmosphere of crackers-and-jellies and white silk frocks, and was wearing on her feet a pair of bronze leather pumps with elastic that criss-crossed over the ankle and a tiny silver filigree rosette on each toe. Going down the path to the field gate, she took it out again and smiled over it, remembering. She had quite forgotten those bronze pumps; there were black ones too, but all the best people wore bronze ones. She wondered who in College possessed a pair. College wore ballet shoes for dancing, with or without blocked toes; and their gymnasium shoes were welted leather with an elastic instep. She had never seen anyone wear those pumps with the little ornament at the toe.

  Perhaps Rouse used them for running down to the gymnasium in the mornings. It was certainly this morning the ornament had been dropped, since The Abhorrence under Giddy's direction was guaranteed to abstract from the gymnasium everything that was not nailed down.

  She hung over the gate for a little but it was chilly there and disappointing; the trees were invisible in the mist, the buttercups a mere rust on the grey meadow, and the may hedges looked like dirty snow. She did not want to go back to the house before breakfast, so she walked along to the tennis courts where the Juniors were mending nets—this was odd-job day for everyone, they said, this being the one day in the year when they conserved their energies against a greater demand to come—and with them she stayed, talking and lending a hand, until they went up to College for breakfast. When they marvelled at her early rising little Miss Morris had suggested that she was tired of cold toast in her room, but when she said frankly that she could not sleep for excitement they were gratified by so proper an emotion in an alien breast, and promised that the reality would beggar expectation. She had not seen anything yet, it seemed.

  She changed her wet shoes, suffered the friendly gibes of the assembled Staff at her access of energy, and went down with them to breakfast.

  It was when she turned to see how Innes was looking this morning that she became aware of a gap in the pattern of bright heads. She did not know the pattern well enough to know who was missing, but there was certainly an empty place at one of the tables. She wondered if Henrietta knew. Henrietta had cast the usual critical eye over the assembly as she sat down, but as the assembly was also at that moment in the act of sitting down the pattern was blurred and any gap not immediately visible.

  Hastily, in case Henrietta did not in fact know about the gap, she withdrew her gaze without further investigation. It was none of her wish to call down retribution on the head of any student, however delinquent. Perhaps, of course, someone had just "gone sick"; which would account for the lack of remark where their absence was concerned.

  Miss Hodge, having wolfed her fish-cake, laid down her fork and swept the students with her small elephant eye. "Miss Wragg," she said, "ask Miss Nash to speak to me."

  Nash got up from her place at the head of the nearest table and presented herself.

  "Is it Miss Rouse who is missing from Miss Stewart's table?"

  "Yes, Miss Hodge."

  A stolid amiable Junior called Tuttle, who was always having to take the can back, was sent on the mission, and came back to say that Rouse was not in her room; which report Beau bore to the head table.

  "Where was Miss Rouse when you saw her last?"

  "I can't remember actually seeing her at all, Miss Hodge. We were all over the place this morning doing different things. It wasn't like sitting in class or being in the gym."

  "Does anyone," said Henrietta addressing the students as a whole, "know where Miss Rouse is?"

  But no one did, apparently.

  "Has anyone seen her this morning?"

  But no one, now they came to think of it, had seen her.

  Henrietta, who had put away two slices of toast while Tuttle was upstairs, said: "Very well, Miss Nash," and Beau went back to her breakfast. Henrietta rolled up her napkin and caught Froken's eye, but Froken was already rising from table, her face anxious.

  "You and I will go to the gymnasium, Froken,"

  Henrietta said, and they went out together, the rest of the Staff trailing after them but not following them out to the gymnasium. It was only on the way upstairs to make her bed that it occurred to Lucy to think: "I could have told them that she wasn't in the gymnasium. How silly of me not to think of it." She tidied her room •*-a task that the students were expected to perform for themselves and which she thought it only fair that she likewise should do for herself—wondering all the time where Rouse could have disappeared to. And why. Could she suddenly have failed again this morning to do that simple boom exercise and been overtaken by a crise des nerfs? That was the only explanation that would fit the odd fact of any College student missing a meal; especially breakfast.

  She crossed into the "old house" and went down the front stairs and out into the garden. From the office came Henrietta's voice talking rapidly to someone on the telephone, so she did not interrupt her. There was still more than half an hour before Prayers; she would spend it reading her mail in the garden, where the mist was rapidly lifting and a shimmer had come into the atmosphere that had been so dead a grey. She went to her favourite seat at the far edge of the garden overlooking the countryside, and it was not until nine o'clock that she came back. There was no doubt about the weather now: it was going to be a lovely day; Henrietta's "tragedy" was not going to happen.

  As she came round the corner of the house an ambulance drove away from the front door down the avenue. She looked at it, puzzled; but decided that in a place like this an ambulance was not the thing of dread that it was to the ordinary civilian. Something to do with the clinic, probably.

  In the drawing-room, instead of the full Staff muster demanded by two minutes of nine o'clock, there was only Miss Lux.

  "Has Rouse turned up?" Lucy asked.

  "Yes."

  "Where was she?"

  "In the gymnasium, with a fractured skull."

  Even in that moment of shock Lucy thought how typical of Lux that succinct sentence was. "But how? What happened?"

  "The pin that holds up the boom wasn't properly in. When she jumped up to it it came down on her head."

  "Good heavens!" Lucy could feel that inert log crash down on her own skull; she had always hated the boom.

  "Froken has just gone away with her in the ambulance to West Larborough."

  "That was smart work."

  "Yes. West Larborough is not far, and luckily at this hour of the morning the ambulance hadn't gone out and once it was on the way there was no traffic to hold it up."

  "What dreadful luck for everyone. On Demonstration Day."

  "Yes. We tried to keep it from the students but that was hopeless, of course. So all we can do is to minimise it."

  "How bad is it, do you think?"

  "No one knows. Miss. Hodge has wired to her people."

  "Weren't they coming to the Dem.?"

  "Apparently not. She has no parents; just an aunt and uncle who brought her up. Come to think of it," she added after a moment's silence, "that is what she looked like: a stray." She did not seem to notice that she had used the past tense.

  "I suppose it was Rouse's own fault?" Lucy asked.

  "Or the student who helped her put up the thing last night."

  "Who was that?"

  "O'Donnell, it seems. Miss Hodge has sent for her to ask her about it."

  At that moment Henrietta herself came in, and all the vague
resentments that Lucy had been nursing against her friend in the last few days melted at sight of Henrietta's face. She looked ten years older, and in some odd fashion at least a stone less heavy.

  "They have a telephone, it seems," she said, continuing the subject that was the only one in her mind, "so I shall be able to talk to them perhaps before the telegram reaches them. They are getting the trunk call for me now. They should be here before night. I want to be available for the telephone call, so will you take Prayers, Miss Lux. Froken will not be back in time." Froken was, as Senior Gymnast, second in rank to Miss Hodge. "Miss Wragg may not be at Prayers; she is getting the gymnasium put to rights. But Madame will be there, and Lucy will back you up."

  "But of course," said Lucy. "I wish there was something more that I could do."

  There was a tap at the door, and O'Donnell appeared.

  "Miss Hodge? You wanted to see me?"

  "Oh, in my office, Miss O'Donnell."

  "You weren't there, so I—"

  "Not that it matters, now that you are here. Tell me: when you put up the boom with Miss Rouse last night —It was you who helped her?"

  "Yes, Miss Hodge."

  "When you put up the boom with her, which end did you take?"

  There was a tense moment of silence. It was obvious that O'Donnell did not know which end of the boom had given way and that what she said in the next few seconds would either damn her or save her. But when she spoke it was with a sort of despairing resolution that stamped what she said with truth.

  "The wall end, Miss Hodge."

  "You put the pin into the upright that is fixed to the wall?"

  "Yes."

  "And Miss Rouse took care of the upright in the middle of the floor."

  "Yes, Miss Hodge."

  "You have no doubt as to which end you attended to?"

  "No, none at all."

  "Why are you so certain?"

  "Because I always did do the end by the wall."

  "Why was that?"

  "Rouse is taller than I am and could shove the boom higher than I could. So I always took the end by the wall so that I could put a foot in the ribstalls when I was putting the pin in."

  "I see. Very well. Thank you, Miss O'Donnell, for being so frank."

  O'Donnell turned to go, and then turned back.

  "Which end came down, Miss Hodge?"

  "The middle end," Miss Hodge said, looking with something like affection on the girl though she had been on the point of letting her go without putting her out of suspense.

  A great wave of colour rushed into O'Donnell's normally pale face. "Oh, thank you!" she said, in a whisper, and almost ran out of the room.

  "Poor wretch," said Lux. "That was a horrible moment for her."

  "It is most unlike Miss Rouse to be careless about apparatus," Henrietta said thoughtfully.

  "You are not suggesting that O'Donnell is not telling the truth?"

  "No, no. What she said was obviously true. It was the natural thing for her to take the wall end where she would have the help of the ribstalls. But I still cannot see how it happened. Apart from Miss Rouse's natural carefulness, a pin would have to be very badly put in indeed for it to be so far not in that it let the boom come down. And the hoisting rope so slack that it let the boom fall nearly three feet!"

  "I suppose Giddy couldn't have done something to it accidentally!"

  "I don't know what he could have done to it. You can't alter a pin put in at that height without stretching up deliberately to it. It is not as if it were something he might possibly touch with his apparatus. And much as he prides himself on the strength of The Abhorrence there is no suction that will pull a pin out from under a boom."

  "No." Lux thought a little. "Vibration is the only kind of force that would alter a pin's position. Some kind of tremor. And there was nothing like that."

  "Not inside the gymnasium, certainly. Miss Rouse locked it as usual last night and gave the key to Giddy, and he unlocked it just after first bell this morning."

  "Then there is no alternative to the theory that for once Rouse was too casual. She was the last to leave the place and the first to come back to it—you wouldn't get anyone there at that hour of the morning who wasn't under the direct compulsion—so the blame is Rouse's. And let us be thankful for it. It is bad enough as it is, but it would be far worse if someone else had been careless and had to bear the knowledge that she was responsible for—"

  The bell rang for Prayers, and downstairs the telephone shrilled in its own hysterical manner.

  "Have you marked the place in the Prayer book?" Lux asked.

  "Where the blue ribbon is," Miss Hodge said, and hurried out to the telephone.

  "Has Froken not come back?" asked Madame, appearing in the doorway. "Ah, well, let us proceed. Life must go on, if I may coin a phrase. And let us hope that this morning's ration of uplift is not too apposite. Holy Writ has a horrible habit of being apposite."

  Not for the first time, Lucy wished Madame Lefevre on a lonely island off Australia.

  It was a silent and subdued gathering that awaited them, and Prayers proceeded in an atmosphere of despondency that was foreign and unprecedented. But with the hymn they recovered a little. It was Blake's and had a fine martial swing, and they sang it with a will. So did Lucy.

  "Nor shall the sword sleep in my hand," she sang, making the most of it. And stopped suddenly, hit in the wind.

  Hit in the wind by a jolt that left her speechless.

  She had just remembered something. She had just remembered why she had been so sure that Rouse would not be found in the gymnasium. Rouse's damp footprints had been visible on the concrete path, and so she had taken it for granted that Rouse had already been and gone. But Rouse had not been. Rouse had come later, and had sprung to the insecure boom and had lain there until after breakfast when she was searched for.

  Then—whose footprints were they?

  "Students," said Miss Hodge, rising in her place after lunch and motioning the rest of the Staff to remain seated, "you are all aware of the unfortunate accident which occurred this morning—entirely through the carelessness of the student concerned. The first thing a gymnast learns is to examine apparatus before she uses it. That a student as responsible and altogether admirable as Miss Rouse should have failed in so simple and fundamental a duty is a warning to you all. That is one point. This is the other. This afternoon we are entertaining guests. There is no secret about what happened this morning—we could not keep it secret even if we wanted to—but I do ask you not to make it a subject of conversation. Our guests are coming here to enjoy themselves; and to know that this morning an accident took place sufficiently serious to send one of our students to hospital would undoubtedly take the edge off their pleasure; if indeed it did not fill them with a quite unnecessary apprehension when watching gymnastics. So if any of you have a desire to dramatise today's happenings, please curb it. It is your business to see that your guests go away happy, without reservations or regrets. I leave the matter to your own good sense."

  It had been a morning of adjustment; physical, mental, and spiritual. Froken had come back from the West Larborough hospital to put a worried lot of Seniors through a routine that would allow for the fact that they were one short. Under her robust calm they took the alterations, and necessity for them, with a fair degree of equanimity; although she reported that at least a third of them shied like nervous colts each time they handled the right-hand front boom, or passed the place where it had fallen. It was going to be a miracle, Froken said with resignation, if they got through this afternoon's performance without someone or other making a fool of themselves. As soon as Froken had released them Madame Lefevre took them over for a much lengthier session. Thanks to her physical prowess, Rouse had been part of almost every item on the ballet programme; which meant that almost every item had to undergo either patching or reconstruction. This thankless and wearisome business had lasted until nearly lunch-time, and the echoes of it were still audibl
e. Most of the lunch-table conversation appeared to consist of remarks like: "Is it you I give my right hand to when Stewart passes in front of me?" and Dakers lightened the universal anxiety by being overtaken by one of those sudden silences common to all gatherings, which left her announcing loudly that my dears, the last hour had proved that one could be in two places at the same time.

  The most fundamental adjustment, however, occurred when both Froken and Madame had finished their respective revisions. It was then that Miss Hodge had sent for Innes and offered her Rouse's place at Arlinghurst. Hospital had confirmed Froken’s diagnosis of a fracture, and there was no chance that Rouse would be able for work until many months had passed. How Innes had taken this no one knew; all that anyone knew was that she had accepted. The appointment, having all the qualities of anti-climax and being overshadowed by an authentic sensation, was taken as a matter of course; and as far as Lucy could see neither Staff nor students gave it a thought. Madame's sardonic: "The Deity disposes," was the solitary comment.

  But Lucy was less happy about it. A vague uneasy stirring plagued her like some mental indigestion. The patness of the thing worried her. The accident had happened not only opportunely but at the last available moment. Tomorrow there would have been no need for Rouse to go to the gymnasium and practise; there would have been no boom set up and no pin to be insecurely placed. And there were those damp footmarks in the early morning. If they were not Rouse's own, whose were they? As Lux had very truly observed, no one could be dragged anywhere near the gymnasium at that hour by anything less compelling than wild horses.

  It was possible that they were Rouse's prints and that she bad done something else before going into the gymnasium for her few minutes on the boom. Lucy could not swear that footprints actually went into the building; she could remember no actual print of either of the two steps. She had merely seen the damp marks on the covered way and concluded, without thinking about it at all, that Rouse was ahead of her. The prints may have continued round the building, for all she knew. They may have had nothing to do with the gymnasium at all. Nothing to do with the students, even. It was possible that those heelless impressions, so vague and blurred, were made by a maid-servant's early-morning shoes.