‘If any,’ said Deborah, following her up the stairs. ‘By the way,’ she added, as they reached the next landing, ‘I do hope we shall remember those beastly strings, and not go tripping over them when we come down again.’
‘I shall remember mine, but I think I’ll untie yours,’ said Mrs Bradley, going down again. The driving-in of the staples, she was particularly interested to notice, had splintered the soft wood, but the splintering had been rendered almost unnoticeable by the application of more of the white paint. Nevertheless (and she had a keen sense of smell) not the slightest odour of paint could be detected.
‘Hm!’ said Mrs Bradley, switching off her powerful torch and rising from her knees. ‘Very painstaking.’
She went up on to the next floor when she had detached Deborah’s string, to find the Sub-Warden seated on Alice’s hat-box and Alice looking scared and uncomfortable.
Chapter 4
A MULTIPLICITY OF PROMISCUOUS VESSELS
« ^ »
‘You know,’ said Kitty, sitting up in her narrow bed and yelling over the partition, ‘the old girl was up to something last night. What do you suppose was the object of all that third-degree velvet-glove stuff she pulled?’
There was no reply from Laura, but Alice put her head over and observed: ‘I didn’t know what she meant, and I don’t now.’
‘But I do,’ said Laura, appearing in the doorway of Alice’s cubicle. ‘On the excuse, if asked, of losing my way to the bathroom — not that you can lose your way anywhere in this geometrically-constructed loose-box — I’ve been down and had a snoop at those doors. I fig-ew-er that the Duchess of Main put on burglar’s gloves and undid those knots with a hairpin. The cords still lie in statu quo, or very nearly so, my loves, and the staples are still fixed firmly in the doors. Ergo, there is going to be one devil of a fine pow-wow-plus-fight; referee and timekeeper that vicious and unstable Old Maid of the Mountains Principal du Mugne, plaintiffs Old Mutt and Young Jeff, defendants our humble selves. What say you, comrades?’
‘Oh, I do hope not,’ said Alice, who was now doing her hair. ‘I don’t want any more questions. It’s horrible. It makes you begin to wonder whether perhaps you did do it, after all.’
‘Well, did you?’ asked Laura. ‘Personally, the orange-skin banana-peel jest, ripe though it may be, has never appealed to yours truly. It’s unsubtle.’
She went into her own cubicle, and the other two could hear drawers being flung open and thrust in again to the accompaniment of a considerable amount of blasphemous comment.
‘What have you lost, Dog?’ inquired Kitty, who retained her comfortable attitude in bed.
‘Belt,’ replied Laura. ‘I received a nasty hint yesterday that we’re supposed to wear stockings to go over to College, and I’ve got nothing to hang mine on to.’
‘Coming over,’ said Kitty obligingly. ‘I can wear my evening one.’
‘Oh, thanks. Mine’s sure to turn up later on. It may be in my trunk. Where are our trunks, by the way?’
‘Down in the basement,’ said Alice, who, they soon discovered, was able to obtain this kind of information, apparently by clairvoyance. ‘We’re supposed to unpack them down there, I think, and carry our things up bit by bit. I’ve got to get a few things out of mine, so if you’d like to give me your keys I’ll bring you up anything you want if you can tell me where to lay hands on it without turning everything else upside down.’
‘I shouldn’t know, love. My mother always does my packing. She says I can’t pack properly, and, so far as I can see, if she persists in that view, I never shall. I’ll come down with you. As for you, Kitty, you’d better get up, or you’ll get no breakfast, if I read the book of words aright.’
On the first-floor landing they met Deborah in her dressing-gown. She was coming out of her bathroom.
‘Isn’t she lovely!’ said Alice, flushing a little.
‘Not bad,’ Laura responded. ‘But she must be at least twenty-five.’
‘Do you think she thinks we did it?’
‘Did what? Oh, the screamingly funny string joke? No, I don’t In fact, she knows we didn’t. So does Aunt Glegg.’
‘The Warden isn’t in the least like Aunt Glegg.’
‘She is to me.’
‘But she can’t be. Aunt Glegg — oh, I don’t know how to put things, but she definitely isn’t and never could be in the very least like Aunt Glegg. You, with your strong literary sense, ought not to talk such rot. You know, you’re like most very clever people — you’re lazy.’
‘Golly!’ said Laura, regarding her companion with such intentness that she almost fell down the stairs. ‘Are you, by any chance, a dark horse, young Alice?’
‘Good heavens, no! ’ said Alice blushing.
‘Well, I’ve been chewing over a few outstanding points during the night watches. I’m no sleeper, although you wouldn’t guess it. And I knew I’d placed our Boadicea aright Her name’s Bradley.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Mrs Bradley.’
‘Yes. I expect she’s a widow or something.’
‘ “Or something” about whangs the old nail on the clock, snout or beezer. She is, in short (and in full, see Timothy Shy’s special news-service, copyright in all languages including Sanskrit), Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, with degrees from every University except Tokio. And she chooses to come here! What I keep asking myself is — why ?’
‘But — then she’s a detective!’ said Alice.
‘And what a detective,’ said Laura. ‘Do you know what I suspect, young Alice?’
‘No. At least, I hope not’
This subtlety was lost on Laura, who replied: ‘Is it a dagger that I see before me, its ’andle to my ’and? No, but it is that same circular saw with which Hawley Harvey carved up his spouse, et voici la plume de ma tante. Goroo! Goroo! (Dickens — or thereabouts.) Stop me if you’ve heard it before. Young Alice, there must be a murderer on the premises!’
All that day, from about eleven in the morning onwards, students continued to arrive. Every train disgorged them, until by seven-thirty the whole College was assembled in the various Halls for dinner. After dinner, on this first day of term, there was a short meeting of all students in the College Hall, but by half-past eight students in couples, groups, platoons, or, in a few cases, singly, were walking across the lawns, through the orchard or upon the gravel paths, back to the various Halls of Residence.
The Athelstan contingent was made up equally of First-Years and Second-Years. There were no Third-Years. These were housed, together with the One-Year Students (practising teachers of some years’ experience who had come to College to obtain a Board of Education Certificate) in Columba, which thus differed from any other of the Halls, and was referred to by the rest (for no reason that Mrs Bradley ever discovered) as Rule Britannia’s.
From their time of arrival until dinner-time most of the students in Athelstan had been occupied in greeting their Warden, meeting their tutor, re-arranging (to the confusion and irritation of Deborah and the senior student) the allotment of study-bedrooms, meeting and greeting one another on the stairs, in passages and even whilst opening and shutting the doors of the W.C.s, and in general creating so much pandemonium that even Deborah, accustomed as she was to the beginning of term at a girls’ school, felt, by the time that dinner was over, as though she had added long, heavy years to an already over-burdened existence.
‘What you want,’ said Mrs Bradley, joining her as she came out of the dining-room, ‘is a drink. Come along, child. And let us find out whether Lulu can make coffee. She says she can. Shall we risk it?’
‘One thing,’ said Deborah twenty minutes later, sipping Lulu’s remarkably good black coffee and eyeing with friendly interest Mrs Bradley’s old brandy, ‘I suppose these wretched kids will go to bed soon? They ought to be completely fagged out.’