‘Have you ever seen a ghost?’ asked Mrs Bradley.
‘No, and I don’t believe in them.’
‘Lulu does.’
‘I suppose so, yes. Negroes always do, even if they don’t admit it’
‘She does admit it. I asked her.’
‘Wasn’t that — you know best, of course, but I should hardly have thought — wouldn’t she immediately fancy she could sense a ghost in this Hall?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t see the point’
‘Perhaps there isn’t one, but I shouldn’t be surprised — and you mustn’t be, either, because I should need your help — if Athelstan produced a ghost before the end of the term. That is why Lulu is exchanging with my sister’s Cambridgeshire kitchen-maid next week. I shall miss her, but that can’t be helped. I don’t want a hysteria-patient on my hands when the spirits walk or — much more likely — talk. How did you like my nephew Jonathan?’
‘I — he — he’s rather clever, isn’t he?’ stammered Deborah, who had been anticipating and dreading this question. ‘But, really, I hardly saw enough of him to know much about him.’
‘Would you call him clever? He’s inclined to be impulsive, rarely a sign of the highest mentality,’ argued Mrs Bradley, eyeing Deborah solemnly. Deborah got up.
‘I hope you’re wrong about the ghost,’ she said, walking away. She did not reappear after dinner, but sat correcting a set of lecture notes and verifying references until about eleven. Then she went to bed without seeing Mrs Bradley again; for on the Monday evening, finding her alone, Jonathan had proposed marriage again, and Deborah had refused him. The trouble was that she had so much wanted to accept the offer, but it seemed to her ridiculous to agree to marry a man she had known for exactly four days.
She had told no one about it, not even Miss Topas. She thought that perhaps she might have confided in Mrs Bradley, but the fact that Jonathan was Mrs Bradley’s nephew made such a confidence, to Deborah’s way of thinking, impossible. However, College would soon fill her mind again, she concluded, particularly if Mrs Bradley was right, and the Athelstan Horrors were merely in their infancy.
She went over them mentally, whilst her pillow seemed to get more and more like something made out of wood. Taken separately, there was nothing very terrifying about them. Of course, things like the coat-slashing and the stabbing of the tins of disinfectant could have, as everyone had pointed out at the time, an unpleasant connotation, and if Mrs Bradley should be right about the hair-cutting, there was, somewhere loose, a devilish agency which it was not very pretty to brood on.
She continued to brood, however, and, when she slept, met Jonathan’s dark face in her dreams.
Chapter 8
SKIRLING AND GROANS
« ^ »
The term went on for a week or two without incident except for what could be accounted for by the normal course of events. Deborah, who was now enjoying her life at Cartaret, began to wonder whether, after all, everything which had occurred at Athelstan since the evening of her arrival at the College had not been magnified, or even falsified, into bearing an interpretation which it did not warrant or deserve.
She argued that Mrs Bradley’s views on some subjects probably were determined — ‘warped’ was the word she first used — by her professional training as a psycho-analyst and by her past experiences as a criminologist.
This point she put to Miss Topas. It was the Monday of the week before School Practice, and Miss Topas, having done nothing all day except give one lecture and a couple of Demonstration lessons in English history, had spent the afternoon in Columba with her shoes off, her feet up, chain-smoking, and debating within herself (she told Deborah, who had been bidden to afternoon tea) which of two invitations she should accept for Christmas.
Deborah knelt on the hearthrug, removed ash from the fire, and began to toast the scones which were lying in a bag, a plate beside them, on the hearth.
‘Debating within oneself is an unprofitable pastime,’ she pronounced seriously. Miss Topas took her feet down and put slippers on them, hitched her chair closer to the fire, flung away the stub of her cigarette and observed:
‘We are all attention. Unveil your past. Is the choice to be made between Tom and Dick, or is it complicated by the introduction of Harry?’
‘You’re as bad as the students,’ said Deborah. ‘That’s the only way their minds work.’
‘Rebuke noted and digested. Go on. Tell me all. By the way, how are the Athelstan Horrors?’
‘That’s the point. We’ve had nothing since that hair-cutting business at Half-Term, and, you know, Cathleen, I still think Miss Vincent did that herself. You know what a light sleeper Mrs Bradley is.’
‘Is she?’
‘Yes, and she was sleeping in my sitting-room opposite the Guest Room where this girl lay, and yet she didn’t hear a sound.’
‘That does seem odd if she really is a light sleeper, unless the person climbed in through an open window, or knew the house very, very well. Even then… is Mrs Bradley certain Miss Vincent didn’t do it herself?’
‘She seemed perfectly certain, I thought, but these people get bees in their bonnets. Then, take the first affair — would you like to butter these as I do them? — that stupid rag. We didn’t find the student she dragged out of the circle, but it doesn’t seem to me that it’s necessarily the same girl each time. Of course, she did say herself that two different people were at work.’
‘I agree. Piling up the jerries and getting some young men to do a war-dance round them doesn’t tally with cutting off a sick person’s hair with the possible intention of frightening her into a fit. I think I’m with you both so far. Of course, we must remember that Mrs Bradley thinks there is a scheme to make Athelstan too hot to hold her, and, if that is the case, then the thing does hang together. But go on. And you might blacken one or two of those scones a bit more for me. I’m rather partial to charcoal.’
‘Well, how would you account for the snakes in that Demonstration lesson Miss Harbottle gave? Granted that they were intended to upset me and not her, I can’t see in that affair anything more than another rather stupid and malicious rag. Can you?’
‘Well, there, don’t you see,’ said Miss Topas. ‘I say, you’ve done enough, I should think. Come on. Let’s eat ’em while they’re hot. Can’t understand people who don’t take sugar. If I don’t get my three lumps per cup I become depressed — I was saying that that’s where Mrs Bradley scores, it seems to me. Stupid and malicious. Doesn’t fit students’ ragging, you know. I was at a big mixed Training College before I came here, but it was just the same. The men, particularly, ragged a good deal, but it was seldom stupid, and as for malicious — not a bit. As a matter of fact, girls, particularly, don’t like to hurt one’s feelings. And the misses like you quite a lot, you know. They wouldn’t want — but don’t let me interrupt you. Proceed with the evidence.’
‘Well, those tins of disinfectant. Wasn’t that malicious?’
‘Yes. Makes the argument even more sound. It simply was malicious, unless it was something Much Worse. You’ve read some morbid psychology, I suppose?’
‘Yes, of course. But isn’t it a boy’s or a man’s trick — that stabbing business?’
‘Yes, it is. Connects up with Jack the Ripper, of course. You could connect the hair-cutting in the same way, you know, and that coat-slashing, too.’
‘You don’t think it could have been a man that Mrs Bradley pulled out of that dancing lot on the first night, when she said it was a girl? The rest were men, you know.’
‘No, I don’t. Besides, the voice. Although possibly that could be faked. But I should imagine that it was a woman all right. Mrs Bradley wouldn’t make that kind of mistake. I shouldn’t myself. The queer thing is — where did the wretched person get to?’