CHAPTER VIII
A Mysterious Happening
"I wonder how it is," philosophized Ruth Latimer, "that one alwaysseems to like some girls so much, and detest others? There are certainpeople who, no matter what they do, or even if their intentions aregood, always rub one up the wrong way."
"Natural affinity, or the reverse, I suppose," answered Maisie Talbot."I'm a great believer in first impressions. I can generally tell infive minutes whether I'm going to be friends with anyone or not; and Ifind I'm nearly certain to be right in the long run."
"I suppose I must have a natural antipathy, then, against FlossieTaylor," confessed Honor candidly. "It didn't take me as long as fiveminutes to discover my sentiments towards her."
"I don't wonder," said Lettice. "Flossie is a bounder!"
"What's that?"
"Oh, Paddy! You've lived at the back of beyond! A boundermeans--well--just a bounder; putting on side, you know."
"How particularly lucid and enlightening!"
"It means someone who tries to make herself out of more consequencethan she really is," explained Maisie. "Flossie is continually dragginginto her conversation the grand things she has at home, and the grandpeople she stays with."
"She doesn't mention them naturally, as anyone might do without beingoffensive," said Ruth Latimer. "She parades them just to show off, in aparticularly obtrusive and objectionable manner."
"And we think that very bad taste at Chessington, because, of course,almost all of us have quite as nice homes and friends, only we don'tcare to boast about them."
"It looks as if you hadn't been accustomed to decent things, if you'realways wanting to let people know you possess them," added Lettice.
"The worst of it is," continued Maisie, "that she's having a badinfluence at St. Chad's. The Hammond-Smiths and the Lawsons and thePalmers follow her lead implicitly, and she's completely spoiling RhodaCunliffe and Hope Robertson. They used to be quite different beforeFlossie came. I don't think Jessie Gray and Gladys Chesters haveimproved either lately. It seems such a pity, because we've alwaysprided ourselves that St. Chad's was the best house in the College, andwe don't want this kind of element to creep in."
"What can we do?" asked Ruth Latimer.
"Suppose we form a league against it! All the nicer girls would join,and if Flossie and her set see that we really vote them bad style,perhaps they'll have the sense to drop it."
"All right. Put me down as your first member. What's the name of theSociety?"
"We might call it the 'Anti-Bounders'. It has a brisk, rolling soundthat's rather jolly."
"The A.B.S. for short," suggested Honor.
"And the rules?" asked Ruth.
"Those could be short and sweet--something on these lines:
"1. No member is to make an unnecessary or ostentatious display ofwealth or valuables.
"2. No member is to brag constantly of high connections or titledfriends.
"3. Members are to consider, not money, but culture, as the standard ofpublic estimation at St. Chad's; and to remember that the essence ofgood breeding is simplicity.
"4. Any member transgressing any of these rules will be blackballed."
"Excellent!" said Ruth. "It puts what we mean in a nutshell. Now, wemust write that out, and try to get signatures. We might add a fifthrule, about not doing sneaking tricks; it's decidedly necessary."
"And our motto could be _Noblesse oblige_," proposed Honor.
The "Anti-Bounders" met with favour among a large proportion of theChaddites, but with much derision from Flossie and her friends, wholost no opportunity of ridiculing the league, nicknamed its members"The Pharisees", and threw open scorn upon its rules. Nevertheless, inspite of their opposition, the society was strong enough to work adecided improvement, particularly among a certain section who wereready to trim their sails according to the prevailing wind, and tofollow blindly the general consensus of public opinion. In future anygirl guilty of inordinate bragging was christened "Chanticler", and awarning "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" would advise her of the fact withoutfurther explanation.
"It's quite enough!" said Maisie. "We don't want to rub it in too hard,but just to let them see that we notice. Jessie Gray is better already,and although Flossie and Claudia make so much fun of us they're reallyextremely nettled, because they thought themselves the absoluteperfection of good style, and it has been a great blow to them todiscover that three-quarters of the house consider them bad form."
It was a constant annoyance to Maisie, Lettice, and Pauline thatFlossie should occupy the fourth cubicle in No. 13 bedroom, and theyoften wondered why Miss Maitland had placed so uncongenial a companionin their midst--"especially when Adeline Vaughan is with theHammond-Smiths in No. 10," said Lettice. "If we might only make anexchange, everybody would be satisfied."
Miss Maitland, however, had reasons for her arrangements, which she didnot care to explain. She knew far more of the inner life of the housethan the girls suspected, and hoped that by a judicious sandwiching ofdifferent elements certain undesirable traits might be eliminated, andthe general tone raised. Though she was often aware of things that werenot entirely to her satisfaction, she was wise enough not to interferedirectly, but by careful tactics to allow the reformation to work fromwithin, experience having taught her that codes fixed by the girlsthemselves were twice as binding as those enforced by the authorities.
The bedrooms at St. Chad's were on two floors, Nos. 9 to 16 being onthe upper story, and Nos. 1 to 7 on the lower. No. 8, occupied by Honorand Janie, was the higher of two small rooms built over the porch, andoccupied a position midway between the two floors, being reached by ashort flight of steps from the landing below. In No. 4 slept EvelynFletcher, the youngest girl in the house. She shared the room with anelder sister and two cousins, all three members of the Sixth Form.Though Evelyn was thirteen, she was very small and childish for herage, and was treated rather as a pet by the Chaddites. She was a prettylittle thing, with appealing blue eyes, fluffy hair, and a helpless,dependent manner. It was the great trial of her life that she wasobliged to go to bed more than an hour before the other occupants ofNo. 4. She had a morbid horror of being alone in the dark--a horrorthat, through a sensitive dread of being laughed at, she had so farconfessed to no one, but which, all the same, was very real andoverwhelming. Night after night she would lie with the curtain of hercubicle half-drawn, and the door ajar so as to catch a gleam of lightfrom the landing, listening with every nerve on the alert for she knewnot what, and enduring agonies until the welcome moment when her sisterMeta came upstairs. It was, of course, very foolish, but her terror wasprobably due to a dangerous illness from which she had suffered someyears before, and which had left a permanent delicacy.
One evening the younger girls had retired as usual, and everything wasvery quiet in the upper stories. Evelyn lay wideawake, sometimesstraining her ears to catch a sound from the ground floor below, andsometimes burying her head in her pillow. Suddenly she sat up in bed,with wide-open, terror-stricken eyes. On the opposite wall theregleamed a strange, dancing light, which appeared and disappeared andreappeared again, flickering faintly from floor to ceiling. Thereseemed no explainable origin for it, and Evelyn's mind at once turnedto the supernatural. A silly maidservant at home had been accustomed toply her with ghost stories, all of which now recurred to her memory.What was it, that unnatural, luminous halo on the opposite wall? It wasmoving nearer to her, and had almost reached the curtain of hercubicle, when, with a choking little gasp, she sprang out of bed, anddarting into the corridor ran shrieking upstairs, her one idea being toescape from the mysterious apparition.
Her screams not only roused all the girls on the higher rooms, butbrought up Vivian Holmes, who had been crossing the hall at the moment,and felt it her duty as monitress to go and investigate.
"What's all this noise about?" she asked. "Evelyn, what's the matter?Has anything frightened you?"
"It's something on my wall," panted Evelyn; "something white, thatmoves."
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br /> "What was it like?"
"I don't know--I can't describe it."
"Perhaps it was a ghost," said Honor, in a hollow voice; "they comesoftly, this way," and, pulling a horrible face, she moved slowlyforward with a gliding motion, her white night-dress completing theillusion.
Trembling from head to foot, Evelyn turned and clung to the monitress.
"Stop that, Honor!" exclaimed Vivian sharply. "It's a wicked thing tofrighten anybody. Come along, Evie! I'll go with you to your room, andwe'll try to find out what this mysterious 'something' is. Go back tobed at once, all the rest of you!"
After making a thorough inspection of No. 4, Vivian found that theuncanny light was, after all, very easy of explanation. It was nothingbut the reflection from a lamp outside, and the swaying of the blindhad been responsible for the movement. Having shown Evelyn theunromantic origin of her spectre, the monitress left her, apparentlypacified, and went downstairs.
In the upper rooms all was soon in absolute stillness. The girls tookVivian's advice and retired to bed again, laughing at having beendisturbed for so trivial a cause.
"Evelyn Fletcher is a goose!" said Flossie Taylor. "She'd run away fromher own shadow."
"She is rather silly," agreed Maisie Talbot. "I've no patience withpeople who imagine ghosts!"
Maisie's own nerves were of the stoutest. She certainly could notsympathize with superstitious fears, and neither flickering lights norpossible spectres would have distressed her in the least.
"When people shriek at nothing and rouse the whole house, they deserveto have something to shriek at," remarked Flossie.
But Maisie was in the act of hopping into bed, and only grunted inreply, while Pauline and Lettice were already half-asleep. Flossie layfor a minute or two pondering over the affair, then got up again verysoftly. First, she felt on her washstand for her tooth powder, anddabbed her face plentifully with it till she was sure it must be whiteall over; then she took the towel, and arranged it over her head, tohide her hair. In every bedroom at St. Chad's there were a candle and abox of matches, in case the electric light should suddenly fail;Flossie groped for these and found them, and, taking them in her hand,left the room on tiptoe.
"Where are you going?" asked Maisie drowsily, but receiving no reply,she did not even trouble to open her eyes.
Once outside the door, Flossie lighted her candle. She was determined,in spite of Vivian's warning, to play a trick upon Evelyn.
"She needs teasing out of such rubbish," she said to herself. "VivianHolmes always makes an absurd fuss of her--quite spoils her, in fact. Ithink the best way to cure people is to laugh at them."
Creeping softly downstairs, she switched off the electric light at theend of the lower landing, and, shading her candle with her hand, passedalong in the darkness to No. 4. Without pausing a moment she entered,holding up one arm in a dramatic attitude, and making her eyes glarewildly from her whitened face. The effect was beyond all that she hadanticipated. Such a scream of agonized fear came from the bed in thecorner that, alarmed at what she had done, Flossie turned and fled. Asshe ran through the door she realized that somebody was hastening alongthe dark passage, and, afraid of being discovered, she turned suddenlyand rushed up the short flight of steps that led to Honor's bedroom,blowing out her candle as she went. She crouched for a few momentsoutside the door of No. 8, then, hearing no footsteps pursuing her, sheventured to steal down again and make a dash for the stairs and theupper landing, where she whisked into No. 13 with all possible speed.
"It was a narrow shave!" she said to herself. "If that was Vivian, andshe had caught me, I expect she'd have made herself uncommonlydisagreeable."
In the meantime, Vivian had returned to the recreation room, and toldthe story of Evelyn's groundless fears to the elder girls assembledthere.
"A shock of this kind is extremely bad for Evie," said Meta. "She had anervous fever four years ago, and has been so fragile and highly-strungever since. She was sent to Chessington because we hoped the bracingair might do her good. I remember she used to have night terrors whenshe was a wee child, but we thought she had quite got over them."
"She looks very white and delicate," said Vivian. "She's all eyes. Ifshe were my sister, I should like to see her less 'nervy'."
"Perhaps I had better run upstairs to her," said Meta, ratheranxiously. "Now I think of it, I remember she always seems mostrelieved when May and Trissie and I make our appearance atnine-thirty."
Meta found the landing in total darkness, a most unusual occurrence, asthe electric light was always left on there. She felt her way along bythe wall, and as she did so she was aware of somebody coming towardsher from the opposite end of the long corridor. Whoever it was carrieda light in her hand, so small as to make only a faint glimmer, butenough to allow Meta to perceive that she turned into No. 4. The nextmoment a cry of frantic fear issued from the room. Meta hurriedforward, her heart throbbing wildly, while the figure, rushing from theroom, and showing in its hasty flight a white-veiled head, darted upthe steps to No. 8, and disappeared, light and all.
It did not take Meta more than three seconds to reach her sister'sbedside. Strangled sounds issued from under the clothes, where Evelynlay cowering in mortal terror; and again, as Meta placed her hand onthe bed, came that convulsive, half-stifled cry.
"Evie! Evie dear! Don't you know me?" exclaimed Meta.
Realizing at last who stood near, Evelyn sat up and flung her armsround her sister. She was in a most agitated, hysterical condition,trembling and quivering with sobs. Meta soothed her as well as shecould, and requested Vivian, who had followed to see that all wasright, to switch on the bedroom light, and also the one in the passage.
"Someone must have intentionally turned it off," she said, "on purposeto play this trick."
"I know I'm silly!" choked Evelyn, more reassured now that the room wasno longer in darkness, "but I can't help it. I really thought it was aghost."
"Who is responsible for this?" asked Vivian indignantly.
"Honor Fitzgerald," replied Meta, without hesitation.
"Are you sure?"
"Whoever it was ran back into No. 8. Janie Henderson would never dreamof doing such a thing, so it must have been Honor."
"She certainly was pretending to be a ghost upstairs," said Vivian. "Ishall go and tell her my opinion of her," and she departed with a verygrim expression on her face.
Janie and Honor were half-asleep when Vivian, like an avenging angel,entered No. 8.
"Look here, Honor Fitzgerald!" she began, "if you try any more of thosesenseless practical jokes, I shall report you to Miss Maitland. I'mmonitress here, and I don't intend to have this kind of thing going onat St. Chad's."
"What's the matter?" asked Honor, rubbing her eyes.
"Matter, indeed! You know as well as I do. It was a cruel, mean trickto play upon a nervous, delicate girl like Evie Fletcher."
Honor was considerably astonished. She, of course, knew nothing ofFlossie's escapade, and imagined that the monitress must be referringto the few words she had said on the upper landing.
"Why, Evie didn't seem to mind all that much!" she retorted.
"You've frightened her most seriously, and I consider it so dangerousthat I'd rather you were expelled from the school than that it shouldhappen again. I don't want to get you into trouble at head-quarters ifI can help it, so I'll say nothing if you'll promise me faithfully thatthis is absolutely the last time you'll ever act ghost."
"Of course I'll promise. I didn't intend to upset Evie. I think bothyou and she are making a great fuss about nothing," replied Honor,lying down once more.
"I'm disgusted with you, Honor Fitzgerald! If you can't realize themischief your thoughtlessness has done, you might at least have thegrace to be sorry for it! To amuse yourself by playing on the fears ofa timid girl, younger than you, is the work of a coward--yes, a coward!That's what I consider you!" and Vivian turned away, full of righteouswrath, and wondering whether she had adequately fulfilled hermonitorial
duty, or whether she ought to have said even more.
The New Girl at St. Chad's: A Story of School Life Page 8
