“Oh, the oddity is slight enough,” he said. “It's not so much the things she writes about as that it's she who should write about them.”
That filled me with forebodings. But I know my duty when Piers begins to talk about literature.
“You mean that up to now you've assumed that she enjoyed the possession of what a plain man would call a healthy mind?”
“If you're that plain man, yes,” he said. “And another thing to bear in mind is that at a place like Towerton she's not likely to have come under influences that would encourage the germination of elvish fancies and eerie illusions. I take it that a Physical Training College is the sort of place where Mens Sana in Corpore Sano is inscribed in letters six foot high on the hygienically tiled walls of every well−ventilated cubicle; where a day that begins at six a.m. with, a cold shower and is divided equally between the gym and the playing−field with brief intervals for wholesome, balanced meals, leaves the body so drowsed with healthy exertion that the minute it tumbles into bed its tenant mind has no option but to draw the blinds likewise and slumber in a blissful blank till cheerful morning bell peals out on the brisk air of day again.”
“Christ!” I said. “It sounds like the seamy side of a concentration camp to me. Was it for this they hanged the Beast of Belsen?”
“Well, some such antiseptic odour of sanity did breathe from her letters from Towerton. True, she's only been at this temple of Freud durch Kraft for a year, and she had imagination; but it's seemed to me from her letters up to now that her powers of invention were under control. In fact, I'm much more likely to spin fairy−tales for the fun of them than she is; and yet...”
“Dammit, Piers, you're very mystifying,” I said. “Stop yetting and tell me what she's written. I haven't often noticed you being perturbed by the eccentricities of your friends, and for my part I can't see why even a gym−teacher shouldn't occasionally skip up a ladder to the lordly lofts of Bedlam and come down with a straw or two in her hair. After all, they shake out.”
Piers got up and opened the cupboard in the corner of the room where he keeps his papers. He brought out a stiff−backed exercise book.
“You know,” he said, pausing with this in his hand, “she got a job for the Long Vac. at a place up here in Northumberland. She mentioned it to me in the last letter I had from her before their term−end. It seemed the sort of thing that would interest her and that she'd do very welclass="underline" looking after some foreign kids. I was hoping I should see her up here and I was waiting to hear the address of the place so that we could fix something up. Well, she hasn't written to me since then until yesterday, when I got this.”
I took the book and flicked the pages over. It was full of legible−looking handwriting.
“It's a longish thing,” Piers said, “and it's getting late now. Would you like to take it and read it sometime before you get up tomorrow and tell me what you think of it?”
I feel that I weighed the duties of friendship rather ungraciously against that fat exercise book for a moment before I resigned myself to saying: “Provided you allow me to get up at my usual hour I might manage it.” And on that we parted for the night.
I didn't really want to lose any sleep over Daphne Hazel's “communication”. To tell the truth, I was afraid that the book threatened a lengthy exercise in self−analysis, some masterpiece of introspection no doubt absorbingly interesting to Daphne Hazel and considerably so to Piers, but not at all to me. I couldn't even exploit it for the purposes of my Tripos. I am reading Oriental Languages and should find a dissertation on the Permutations of the Infirm Letters both more instructive and more entertaining.
I fully intended, therefore, to leave the manuscript until my morning cup of tea put me in a more indulgent frame of mind. But, a document is a document, and I could not help but give a glance at it as I smoked my last pipe in bed. Alas for prudent resolution... I stayed awake until I had finished the book and that was at some hour in the morning the existence of which I am normally loath to admit.
This is as much introduction as Daphne Hazel's story needs, and here it follows, faithfully typed out by my own two forefingers.
Daphne Hazels Story
(1)
One evening shortly before the end of last term three or four of us, all Juniors, were having coffee in Miss Corrigan's room, as we usually do two or three nights a week. Miss Corrigan lectures on Anatomy, Biology, the Chemistry of the Body and Dietetics. We all like her. She's unconventional and when she lectures there's some fun in even a dry subject like chemistry. There is a standing invitation to Juniors and Seniors alike to have coffee in her room after dinner and our particular gang have acquired the habit of using her room almost as a common−room, or, as she tells us, a nursery.
I remember the people who were there that evening. There was Connie Webster, Mu. Jordan, Teresa Faldingworth, Mary Paxton and myself. We had finished the First Year Exams that day and were in a mood of hilarious relief. We were noisy and inclined to throw ourselves about all over the place. We quietened down after a while. Connie Webster and Mu. Jordan, I remember, had been wrestling over a photo on Corrigan's divan and they sprawled rather untidily there. The rest of us lay inelegantly but comfortably on the carpet round Corrigan's chair.
Someone began to talk about what she was going to do in the Vac. and so we came to gossip about holidays. Mu. Jordan said she had applied through the Students' Union for a holiday job in Holland. Somebody else said she wouldn't mind having a job during the Vac, and then Miss Corrigan said: “Well then, why doesn't one of you take this on?” And she fished a letter out of a stuffed paper−rack beside her chair. “It's an old acquaintance of mine,” she said, “who wants someone to coach two or three foreign children during the summer holiday. It's up in Northumberland.”
We asked rather indifferently what the place was like. “I can't tell you that,” she said, “because I was never there. My friend's been buried these many years in archaeology, so maybe you won't be able to step across the house for folio volumes or see across it for the dust rising from them; and it's beyond conjecture what sort of little imps the foreign brats will be. But if one of you likes to take the risk there's the address.” She tore off the top of the letter and dropped it into my lap—no doubt because I was the nearest.
Later I showed it round but no one was particularly interested, so I kept it by me for a few days. I did not, just then, think seriously of doing anything about it myself. As Term−end approached, however, and I heard, all round me, talk of going away to this and that exciting−sounding place, I began to wish that I had something fixed up for the holidays instead of just having to go back to Whitehill and spend all a long summer with Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Fred. Someone asked me where I was going for my holiday and the vision I had then of Whitehill and the deadly dullness of Green Street determined me. I took out the scrap of paper again and wrote to the address it gave: