Hampstead was temperamental and really musical. Under Alceste Boyle’s inspiration and an assumed name he had published several minor works and a full symphony. The money he made, however, apart from his teaching, was negligible, and one of the most important reasons which he and Alceste shared for wishing to keep their illicit relationship secret was the fear of losing their posts. To do Mr. Cliffordson justice, he would never have dreamed of asking the board of governors to dismiss either of them. He neither approved nor disapproved of “free love” in itself, but he was a man who held strong views on the right of every human being to form his own code of behaviour, and as long as that code did not impair efficiency or act prejudicially to health and happiness, he would tolerate it gladly. Hampstead and Mrs. Boyle did not realize this. Perhaps, too, there was a certain charm about the secrecy of the whole thing. It was hidden treasure; the more valuable in their eyes simply because it had to remain hidden.
The person who ought to have been in the cast, but had had to give place to the mild and unassuming Miss Ferris, was the Physical Training Mistress. She had departed for Montreux in a very bad temper, stayed in Switzerland a fortnight, crossed into Italy and stayed on the shores of Lake Lugano, left because Lugano was full of elementary school-teachers, and went to Monte Carlo, where she lost heavily at the tables. She then wired her father for the money to return home, and spent the rest of the holiday writing letters and sulking in the garden of the vicarage in Shropshire, where her parents lived. She returned to school in a worse temper than that in which she had left at the end of term.
chapter ii: rehearsal
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i
The autumn term took its usual course until the dress-rehearsal of The Mikado, or, more exactly, until the day upon which the dress-rehearsal was to take place. On that day Miss Ferris began badly by being late for school. She could not remember ever having been late before, but there was a certain amount of excuse which a more self-indulgent person might have made for herself.
On the previous evening her landlady had given her fish for supper. It was not fresh, and Miss Ferris had been kept awake the better part of the night by severe abdominal pains. She took some aspirin tablets—two, in point of fact —and towards morning she fell asleep. She was a person who liked between seven and eight hours’ sleep at night, and although, presumably, her alarum clock ran down at the usual time, it did not wake her, so it was past eight o’clock when her landlady knocked at the door to inform her that breakfast had been on the table upwards of ten minutes.
The consequences of all this was that Miss Ferris was hurrying into school at five minutes past nine, knowing that she was due for a severe attack of indigestion because she had bolted a breakfast consisting chiefly of sausages, and knowing also that she would consider it her duty to seek out the Headmaster and apologize for her unpunctuality. Mr. Cliffordson was urbane and sympathetic, but that did not comfort Miss Ferris, who was almost morbidly conscientious in all matters concerning school and her work there. She went to her first class feeling thoroughly out of tune with the day. Unfortunately, her first class was the Upper Third Commercial.
It often happens in a school that different children react upon different teachers in very different ways. On the whole, Miss Ferris escaped being ragged. She was sensible, kindly, had a strong parental instinct, and was sufficiently interested herself in her special subject to make it interesting and intelligible to the children. She was fortunate in that her subject happened to be Lower School arithmetic, for, in spite of assertions to the contrary by various eminent educationists, the fact remains that the majority of children under fourteen like arithmetic even when they are not particularly good at it.
But in the Upper Third Commercial, which was a form of thirteen-year-olds, there was a girl whom Miss Ferris disliked. She was an unpleasantly ferret-faced damsel, Cartnell by name, with stringy fair hair, impertinent grey eyes, a keen mind for which, so far, school work had provided little stimulus, and a flair for gymnastics. Miss Ferris, who occasionally coached the younger girls in the game, would have been prepared to take an interest in the girl because of her almost uncanny proficiency at netball, but her behaviour in form was such that, beyond recommending her to the notice of the Gymnasium Mistress (who immediately gave her a place in the school second team and declared that she was really good enough to play in the first), Miss Ferris ignored her when it was possible, reprimanded her when it was not, and, on this fateful Tuesday, the day of the dress-rehearsal of The Mikado, kept her in.
On any other day two things would have been certain. One was that Miss Ferris would not have kept her in, because any kind of punishment was against the tradition of the school; and, under Mr. Cliffordson’s rule—he happened to be a genius in managing adolescent girls and boys —it is only fair to state that punishment was seldom necessary. The other thing was that it would not have mattered quite so much if she had kept her in, but this particular Tuesday was the day of the semi-final of the Schools Netball League, and the first team attacking centre was absent with a broken arm, consequently the girl Cartnell had been chosen by Miss Camden to fill the vacant position.
“And, between you and me,” Miss Camden had told the Headmaster, “we shall do better with Cartnell than with Poultney, for she’s a far better player, although I don’t agree with putting youngsters in the first team, really.”
The Headmaster, lacking interest in the subject, agreed absently.
To do Miss Ferris justice, she was not aware that the girl had been chosen to play in the match that day, but, having announced her decision, she declined to depart from it in spite of the victim’s tearful reproaches. The rest of the lesson passed off in silence, Miss Ferris gloomily aware that she had put herself in a very delicate position but determined that she would not give way, the form— even the boys—oppressed by the atmosphere of misery, and the girl Cartnell moodily drawing on the outside cover of her pencil-work book and praying for Miss Ferris to be smitten by God. At the end of the lesson the child went straight to Miss Camden and informed that belligerent lady that she could not play in the match that afternoon.
“Why not?” demanded Miss Camden.
“Please, Miss Camden, I’m staying in for Miss Ferris until five o’clock.”
“Rubbish,” said Miss Camden, unwisely. “I’ll speak to Miss Ferris. Go along now. I shall expect to see you at the school gate at three-thirty.”
The girl Cartnell went back to her class, which was prepared to take a geography lesson from Miss Freely, and managed to get a note passed round the form which ran thus:
“Fuzzy Ferris is going to get it in the neck from Cammy for trying to keep me in. What do you bet I play after all?”
She did not play after all. Miss Ferris, with a forcefulness which surprised herself, defended her position even when the case was taken before the Headmaster. The Headmaster, who thought the Gymnastic Mistress far too much interested in games to allow full scope to the ideals of the school, which might be summed up: “The individual first, the ‘team spirit’ afterwards,” took the side of Miss Ferris, sent for the girl Cartnell, admonished her, sent for her arithmetic book, admonished her again when he had seen it, and kept her in his room from two o’clock until five doing arithmetic.