Chapter VIII: A Mysterious Happening

"I wonder how it is," philosophized Ruth Latimer, "that one always seems to like some girls so much, and detest others? There are certain people who, no matter what they do, or even if their intentions are good, always rub one up the wrong way."

"Natural affinity, or the reverse, I suppose," answered Maisie Talbot. "I'm a great believer in first impressions. I can generally tell in five minutes whether I'm going to be friends with anyone or not; and I find I'm nearly certain to be right in the long run."

"I suppose I must have a natural antipathy, then, against Flossie Taylor," confessed Honor candidly. "It didn't take me as long as five minutes to discover my sentiments towards her."

"I don't wonder," said Lettice. "Flossie is a bounder!"

"What's that?"

"Oh, Paddy! You've lived at the back of beyond! A bounder means--well--just a bounder; putting on side, you know."

"How particularly lucid and enlightening!"

"It means someone who tries to make herself out of more consequence than she really is," explained Maisie. "Flossie is continually dragging into her conversation the grand things she has at home, and the grand people she stays with."

"She doesn't mention them naturally, as anyone might do without being offensive," said Ruth Latimer. "She parades them just to show off, in a particularly obtrusive and objectionable manner."

"And we think that very bad taste at Chessington, because, of course, almost all of us have quite as nice homes and friends, only we don't care to boast about them."

"It looks as if you hadn't been accustomed to decent things, if you're always wanting to let people know you possess them," added Lettice.

"The worst of it is," continued Maisie, "that she's having a bad influence at St. Chad's. The Hammond-Smiths and the Lawsons and the Palmers follow her lead implicitly, and she's completely spoiling Rhoda Cunliffe and Hope Robertson. They used to be quite different before Flossie came. I don't think Jessie Gray and Gladys Chesters have improved either lately. It seems such a pity, because we've always prided ourselves that St. Chad's was the best house in the College, and we don't want this kind of element to creep in."

"What can we do?" asked Ruth Latimer.

"Suppose we form a league against it! All the nicer girls would join, and if Flossie and her set see that we really vote them bad style, perhaps they'll have the sense to drop it."

"All right. Put me down as your first member. What's the name of the Society?"

"We might call it the 'Anti-Bounders'. It has a brisk, rolling sound that's rather jolly."

"The A.B.S. for short," suggested Honor.

"And the rules?" asked Ruth.

"Those could be short and sweet--something on these lines:

"1. No member is to make an unnecessary or ostentatious display of wealth or valuables.

"2. No member is to brag constantly of high connections or titled friends.

"3. Members are to consider, not money, but culture, as the standard of public estimation at St. Chad's; and to remember that the essence of good breeding is simplicity.

"4. Any member transgressing any of these rules will be blackballed."

"Excellent!" said Ruth. "It puts what we mean in a nutshell. Now, we must write that out, and try to get signatures. We might add a fifth rule, about not doing sneaking tricks; it's decidedly necessary."

"And our motto could be _Noblesse oblige_," proposed Honor.

The "Anti-Bounders" met with favour among a large proportion of the Chaddites, but with much derision from Flossie and her friends, who lost no opportunity of ridiculing the league, nicknamed its members "The Pharisees", and threw open scorn upon its rules. Nevertheless, in spite of their opposition, the society was strong enough to work a decided improvement, particularly among a certain section who were ready to trim their sails according to the prevailing wind, and to follow blindly the general consensus of public opinion. In future any girl guilty of inordinate bragging was christened "Chanticler", and a warning "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" would advise her of the fact without further explanation.

"It's quite enough!" said Maisie. "We don't want to rub it in too hard, but just to let them see that we notice. Jessie Gray is better already, and although Flossie and Claudia make so much fun of us they're really extremely nettled, because they thought themselves the absolute perfection of good style, and it has been a great blow to them to discover that three-quarters of the house consider them bad form."

It was a constant annoyance to Maisie, Lettice, and Pauline that Flossie should occupy the fourth cubicle in No. 13 bedroom, and they often wondered why Miss Maitland had placed so uncongenial a companion in their midst--"especially when Adeline Vaughan is with the Hammond-Smiths in No. 10," said Lettice. "If we might only make an exchange, everybody would be satisfied."

Miss Maitland, however, had reasons for her arrangements, which she did not care to explain. She knew far more of the inner life of the house than the girls suspected, and hoped that by a judicious sandwiching of different elements certain undesirable traits might be eliminated, and the general tone raised. Though she was often aware of things that were not entirely to her satisfaction, she was wise enough not to interfere directly, but by careful tactics to allow the reformation to work from within, experience having taught her that codes fixed by the girls themselves were twice as binding as those enforced by the authorities.

The bedrooms at St. Chad's were on two floors, Nos. 9 to 16 being on the upper story, and Nos. 1 to 7 on the lower. No. 8, occupied by Honor and Janie, was the higher of two small rooms built over the porch, and occupied a position midway between the two floors, being reached by a short flight of steps from the landing below. In No. 4 slept Evelyn Fletcher, the youngest girl in the house. She shared the room with an elder sister and two cousins, all three members of the Sixth Form. Though Evelyn was thirteen, she was very small and childish for her age, and was treated rather as a pet by the Chaddites. She was a pretty little thing, with appealing blue eyes, fluffy hair, and a helpless, dependent manner. It was the great trial of her life that she was obliged to go to bed more than an hour before the other occupants of No. 4. She had a morbid horror of being alone in the dark--a horror that, through a sensitive dread of being laughed at, she had so far confessed to no one, but which, all the same, was very real and overwhelming. Night after night she would lie with the curtain of her cubicle half-drawn, and the door ajar so as to catch a gleam of light from the landing, listening with every nerve on the alert for she knew not what, and enduring agonies until the welcome moment when her sister Meta came upstairs. It was, of course, very foolish, but her terror was probably due to a dangerous illness from which she had suffered some years before, and which had left a permanent delicacy.

One evening the younger girls had retired as usual, and everything was very quiet in the upper stories. Evelyn lay wideawake, sometimes straining her ears to catch a sound from the ground floor below, and sometimes burying her head in her pillow. Suddenly she sat up in bed, with wide-open, terror-stricken eyes. On the opposite wall there gleamed a strange, dancing light, which appeared and disappeared and reappeared again, flickering faintly from floor to ceiling. There seemed no explainable origin for it, and Evelyn's mind at once turned to the supernatural. A silly maidservant at home had been accustomed to ply her with ghost stories, all of which now recurred to her memory. What was it, that unnatural, luminous halo on the opposite wall? It was moving nearer to her, and had almost reached the curtain of her cubicle, when, with a choking little gasp, she sprang out of bed, and darting into the corridor ran shrieking upstairs, her one idea being to escape from the mysterious apparition.

Her screams not only roused all the girls on the higher rooms, but brought up Vivian Holmes, who had been crossing the hall at the moment, and felt it her duty as monitress to go and investigate.

"What's all this noise about?" she asked. "Evelyn, what's the matter? Has anything frightened you?"

"It's something on my wall," panted Evelyn; "something white, that moves."

"What was it like?"

"I don't know--I can't describe it."

"Perhaps it was a ghost," said Honor, in a hollow voice; "they come softly, this way," and, pulling a horrible face, she moved slowly forward with a gliding motion, her white night-dress completing the illusion.

Trembling from head to foot, Evelyn turned and clung to the monitress.

"Stop that, Honor!" exclaimed Vivian sharply. "It's a wicked thing to frighten anybody. Come along, Evie! I'll go with you to your room, and we'll try to find out what this mysterious 'something' is. Go back to bed at once, all the rest of you!"

After making a thorough inspection of No. 4, Vivian found that the uncanny light was, after all, very easy of explanation. It was nothing but the reflection from a lamp outside, and the swaying of the blind had been responsible for the movement. Having shown Evelyn the unromantic origin of her spectre, the monitress left her, apparently pacified, and went downstairs.

In the upper rooms all was soon in absolute stillness. The girls took Vivian's advice and retired to bed again, laughing at having been disturbed for so trivial a cause.

"Evelyn Fletcher is a goose!" said Flossie Taylor. "She'd run away from her own shadow."

"She is rather silly," agreed Maisie Talbot. "I've no patience with people who imagine ghosts!"

Maisie's own nerves were of the stoutest. She certainly could not sympathize with superstitious fears, and neither flickering lights nor possible spectres would have distressed her in the least.

"When people shriek at nothing and rouse the whole house, they deserve to have something to shriek at," remarked Flossie.

But Maisie was in the act of hopping into bed, and only grunted in reply, while Pauline and Lettice were already half-asleep. Flossie lay for a minute or two pondering over the affair, then got up again very softly. First, she felt on her washstand for her tooth powder, and dabbed her face plentifully with it till she was sure it must be white all over; then she took the towel, and arranged it over her head, to hide her hair. In every bedroom at St. Chad's there were a candle and a box of matches, in case the electric light should suddenly fail; Flossie groped for these and found them, and, taking them in her hand, left the room on tiptoe.

"Where are you going?" asked Maisie drowsily, but receiving no reply, she did not even trouble to open her eyes.

Once outside the door, Flossie lighted her candle. She was determined, in spite of Vivian's warning, to play a trick upon Evelyn.

"She needs teasing out of such rubbish," she said to herself. "Vivian Holmes always makes an absurd fuss of her--quite spoils her, in fact. I think the best way to cure people is to laugh at them."

Creeping softly downstairs, she switched off the electric light at the end of the lower landing, and, shading her candle with her hand, passed along in the darkness to No. 4. Without pausing a moment she entered, holding up one arm in a dramatic attitude, and making her eyes glare wildly from her whitened face. The effect was beyond all that she had anticipated. Such a scream of agonized fear came from the bed in the corner that, alarmed at what she had done, Flossie turned and fled. As she ran through the door she realized that somebody was hastening along the dark passage, and, afraid of being discovered, she turned suddenly and rushed up the short flight of steps that led to Honor's bedroom, blowing out her candle as she went. She crouched for a few moments outside the door of No. 8, then, hearing no footsteps pursuing her, she ventured to steal down again and make a dash for the stairs and the upper landing, where she whisked into No. 13 with all possible speed.

"It was a narrow shave!" she said to herself. "If that was Vivian, and she had caught me, I expect she'd have made herself uncommonly disagreeable."

In the meantime, Vivian had returned to the recreation room, and told the story of Evelyn's groundless fears to the elder girls assembled there.

"A shock of this kind is extremely bad for Evie," said Meta. "She had a nervous fever four years ago, and has been so fragile and highly-strung ever since. She was sent to Chessington because we hoped the bracing air might do her good. I remember she used to have night terrors when she was a wee child, but we thought she had quite got over them."

"She looks very white and delicate," said Vivian. "She's all eyes. If she were my sister, I should like to see her less 'nervy'."

"Perhaps I had better run upstairs to her," said Meta, rather anxiously. "Now I think of it, I remember she always seems most relieved when May and Trissie and I make our appearance at nine-thirty."

Meta found the landing in total darkness, a most unusual occurrence, as the electric light was always left on there. She felt her way along by the wall, and as she did so she was aware of somebody coming towards her from the opposite end of the long corridor. Whoever it was carried a light in her hand, so small as to make only a faint glimmer, but enough to allow Meta to perceive that she turned into No. 4. The next moment a cry of frantic fear issued from the room. Meta hurried forward, her heart throbbing wildly, while the figure, rushing from the room, and showing in its hasty flight a white-veiled head, darted up the steps to No. 8, and disappeared, light and all.

It did not take Meta more than three seconds to reach her sister's bedside. Strangled sounds issued from under the clothes, where Evelyn lay cowering in mortal terror; and again, as Meta placed her hand on the bed, came that convulsive, half-stifled cry.

"Evie! Evie dear! Don't you know me?" exclaimed Meta.

Realizing at last who stood near, Evelyn sat up and flung her arms round her sister. She was in a most agitated, hysterical condition, trembling and quivering with sobs. Meta soothed her as well as she could, and requested Vivian, who had followed to see that all was right, to switch on the bedroom light, and also the one in the passage.

"Someone must have intentionally turned it off," she said, "on purpose to play this trick."

"I know I'm silly!" choked Evelyn, more reassured now that the room was no longer in darkness, "but I can't help it. I really thought it was a ghost."

"Who is responsible for this?" asked Vivian indignantly.

"Honor Fitzgerald," replied Meta, without hesitation.

"Are you sure?"

"Whoever it was ran back into No. 8. Janie Henderson would never dream of doing such a thing, so it must have been Honor."

"She certainly was pretending to be a ghost upstairs," said Vivian. "I shall go and tell her my opinion of her," and she departed with a very grim expression on her face.

Janie and Honor were half-asleep when Vivian, like an avenging angel, entered No. 8.

"Look here, Honor Fitzgerald!" she began, "if you try any more of those senseless practical jokes, I shall report you to Miss Maitland. I'm monitress here, and I don't intend to have this kind of thing going on at St. Chad's."

"What's the matter?" asked Honor, rubbing her eyes.

"Matter, indeed! You know as well as I do. It was a cruel, mean trick to play upon a nervous, delicate girl like Evie Fletcher."

Honor was considerably astonished. She, of course, knew nothing of Flossie's escapade, and imagined that the monitress must be referring to the few words she had said on the upper landing.

"Why, Evie didn't seem to mind all that much!" she retorted.

"You've frightened her most seriously, and I consider it so dangerous that I'd rather you were expelled from the school than that it should happen again. I don't want to get you into trouble at head-quarters if I can help it, so I'll say nothing if you'll promise me faithfully that this is absolutely the last time you'll ever act ghost."

"Of course I'll promise. I didn't intend to upset Evie. I think both you and she are making a great fuss about nothing," replied Honor, lying down once more.

"I'm disgusted with you, Honor Fitzgerald! If you can't realize the mischief your thoughtlessness has done, you might at least have the grace to be sorry for it! To amuse yourself by playing on the fears of a timid girl, younger than you, is the work of a coward--yes, a coward! That's what I consider you!" and Vivian turned away, full of righteous wrath, and wondering whether she had adequately fulfilled her monitorial duty, or whether she ought to have said even more.