Miss Camden took the netball team to play their match. They lost by twelve goals to seven, and so had no chance to play in the final and gain the handsome trophy which was offered to the winning school. Miss Camden was furious in a way and to an extent which can only be understood and sympathized with by persons who habitually put all their eggs into one basket and then drop the lot. She was a hard, narrow-minded, egotistical young woman who lived entirely for success with the school games, and had dreams of breaking down the Headmaster’s slightly antagonistic attitude towards her subject and making the girls of the school foremost in England in gymnastic competitions and in games.
Poor Miss Ferris, worn out with argument, nervous strain, indigestion and loss of sleep, went home to tea at five and came back at half-past six for the dress-rehearsal of The Mikado. She was the most complete, but not the only, failure that night. Hurstwood, who was nervous, sang his first song half a tone flat and his second entirely out of tune. Moira Malley was exceedingly nervous and gauche, and, owing to their united fumbling, the First Act was a fiasco. Alceste Boyle was furious, young Mr. Browning, the prompter, was in despair, Frederick Hampstead, the conductor, was laughing. Poor Miss Ferris was almost and Moira Malley was quite in tears. Miss Cliffordson was cold to poor Hurstwood during the interval and colder at the end of the performance, and he was in the depths of despair. The Headmaster was soothing. Every-thing, he was sure, would be splendid on the night. Nobody believed him. It was a most disastrous evening. It was nine-thirty by the time they had finished, but Alceste Boyle was determined to do the First Act again.
“And, look here, Miss Ferris,” she said, suddenly getting back her temper, and smiling kindly at the wilting “Katisha,” hideous with the make-up which little Mrs. Berotti, the professional, had so liberally plastered on her ordinarily plain but not unpleasing countenance, “when ‘Katisha’ says the bit beginning: ‘None whatever. On the contrary, I was going to marry him—yet he fled!’—you remember? —I think perhaps it wants a little more—”
“Do it, Alceste,” said Mr. Smith, the “Mikado” himself, grinning.
“Yes, go on, do!” said a number of other voices. Miss Ferris, humility itself before the great Alceste, added timidly but with evident sincerity. “It would be so good of you.”
“Start at the beginning of Act Two,” suggested the Headmaster, “and we’ll all play up to you. Pitch it high. It will pull us out.”
The little ex-actress, Mrs. Berotti, came from behind the scenes to watch.
“But it is magnificent,” she replied, in response to a whispered question from Frederick Hampstead. There was a spontaneous burst of applause at the conclusion of the “Tit-Willow” song, but it was less for Mr. Poole, good though he was, than for Alceste. She laughed, her good humour completely restored, and then commanded that the First Act should be commenced before it was too late to get through it.
Calma Ferris’s first entrance did not come until almost the end of the First Act, and, still very much upset by her own mishandling of the part, but valiantly determined to copy Alceste’s wonderful rendering to the life, she wandered into the nearest class-room, which happened to be the Art Room, and, knowing that at least an hour must pass before she would be wanted, she switched on the lights and began looking at the pictures. On a stand about four feet high, opposite the door, was an object covered with a cloth.
Miss Ferris, wondering what was the nature of the work of art thus chastely hidden from view, walked over to it. It was intended, apparently, to be covered completely by the cloth, but the covering had been done so carelessly that a darkish-coloured lump was visible. Miss Ferris was not an abnormally inquisitive woman. Had none of the object been visible the probability is that she would not have dreamed of uncovering it; but the sight of part of what was obviously a piece of modelling in clay, and therefore something upon which she felt herself to be an authority, for she had trained for primary school teaching, proved to be too stimulating to her curiosity to be ingored. She began to withdraw the rest of the covering. To her horror, the whole model fell to the ground, and in trying to save it she damaged it badly.
She could have wept with remorse. She was ordinarily so careful of other people’s property and so meticulously scrupulous about minding her own business that it was a piece of very bad luck that such a misfortune should have occurred. She realized too late, when she tried to assess the extent of the damage she had done, that this was not the work of a boy or girl in the school. It could be nothing other than the Art Master’s own model upon which he had been working for weeks past, ready to make a plaster cast from it, so that it was not, in one sense, finished work. Nevertheless, it was, even to her untutored sense, a particularly fine model; and it was something which she could do nothing to replace. Distressed beyond measure, she switched off the lights, and, wandering out again, found a chair at the side of the stage but below the stage level, and there she sat, waiting for her cue, a somewhat curious sight with her neat eyeglasses adorning the fearful countenance of “Katisha.”
The particular place she had chosen was in a rather dark corner. She sat there for a long time listening to the rehearsal, which seemed to be going rather better, she thought, and she was almost forgetting her worries in absorbing herself in the now familiar lines and songs, when her attention was distracted by the sound of voices close at hand. The first was Miss Cliffordson’s voice. The second she could not place for a moment, and then she realized that it could belong only to Hurstwood, the youthful “Nanki-Poo.”
“My dear boy,” Miss Cliffordson was saying in tones low enough not to disturb what was being done on the stage, “I’m old enough to be—well, your aunt, anyway! Do be sensible.”
“I can’t, any more,” responded the boy.
“Well, for goodness’ sake, come in here, then, and talk,” said Miss Cliffordson, half annoyed and half tenderly.
There was the sound of a class-room door being opened, and they went into the Art Room from which Miss Ferris had lately emerged. She rose abruptly, and walked in after them. They had not closed the door, and the embroidered Japanese slippers she was wearing happened to be soundless as she walked. Her purpose, subconscious, not expressed even to herself, was to prevent anybody seeing the damage she had done to Mr. Smith’s model. As she got to the door, however, she paused, for Miss Cliffordson’s voice, low and urgent, was saying:
“Harry, you idiot, you can’t!”
There was a scuffling noise, and Hurstwood’s voice, muffled and with a note of agony, said, almost on a sob:
“I must! I must! I can’t stick it any longer!”
“No!” said Miss Cliffordson, breathlessly this time. “You’re not to be…”
The sentence trailed off. There was the sound of kisses and heavy breathing, and then Miss Cliffordson said in a frightened tone: “My dear, you can’t go on like this! It isn’t—it isn’t right!”
Then the boy’s voice, full of pain, replied: “It is! It is! Don’t you—can’t you understand———”
At this point, and not entirely of her own volition, for her finger had been on the switch for some moments and the pressure she suddenly exerted was nervous rather than wilful, Miss Ferris turned on the light. There was an exclamation. A heap of brilliant colouring in the middle of the space in front of the teacher’s desk sorted itself into a youth and a girl, both in Japanese costume. Miss Cliffordson said with nervous hilarity:
“What ho! Here’s your ‘Katisha’ come for you, my lad!”
Miss Ferris managed to say: