Death at the Opera (4 page)

The person who ought to have been in the cast, but had had to give place to the mild and unassuming Miss Ferris, was the Physical Training Mistress. She had departed for Montreux in a very bad temper, stayed in Switzerland a fortnight, crossed into Italy and stayed on the shores of Lake Lugano, left because Lugano was full of elementary school-teachers, and went to Monte Carlo, where she lost heavily at the tables. She then wired her father for the money to return home, and spent the rest of the holiday writing letters and sulking in the garden of the vicarage in Shropshire, where her parents lived. She returned to school in a worse temper than that in which she had left at the end of term.

CHAPTER II

I

T
HE
autumn term took its usual course until the dress-rehearsal of
The Mikado
, or, more exactly, until the day upon which the dress-rehearsal was to take place. On that day Miss Ferris began badly by being late for school. She could not remember ever having been late before, but there was a certain amount of excuse which a more self-indulgent person might have made for herself.

On the previous evening her landlady had given her fish for supper. It was not fresh, and Miss Ferris had been kept awake the better part of the night by severe abdominal pains. She took some aspirin tablets—two, in point of fact—and towards morning she fell asleep. She was a person who liked between seven and eight hours' sleep at night, and although, presumably, her alarm clock ran down at the usual time, it did not wake her, so it was past eight o'clock when her landlady knocked at the door to inform her that breakfast had been on the table upwards of ten minutes.

The consequences of all this was that Miss Ferris was hurrying into school at five minutes past nine, knowing that she was due for a severe attack of indigestion because she had bolted a breakfast consisting chiefly of sausages, and knowing also that she would consider it her duty to seek out the Headmaster and apologize for her unpunctuality. Mr. Cliffordson was urbane and sympathetic, but that did not comfort Miss Ferris, who was almost morbidly conscientious in all matters concerning school and her work there. She went to her first class feeling throughly out of tune with the day. Unfortunately, her first class was the Upper Third Commercial.

It often happens in a school that different children react upon different teachers in very different ways. On the whole, Miss Ferris escaped being ragged. She was sensible, kindly, had a strong parental instinct, and was sufficiently interested herself in her special subject to make it interesting and intelligible to the children. She was fortunate in that her subject happened to be Lower School arithmetic, for, in spite of assertions to the contrary by various eminent educationists, the fact remains that the majority of children under fourteen like arithmetic even when they are not particularly good at it.

But in the Upper Third Commercial, which was a form of thirteen-year-olds, there was a girl whom Miss Ferris disliked. She was an unpleasantly ferret-faced damsel, Cartnell by name, with stringy fair hair, impertinent grey eyes, a keen mind for which, so far, school work had provided little stimulus, and a flair for gymnastics. Miss Ferris, who occasionally coached the younger girls in the game, would have been prepared to take an interest in the girl because of her almost uncanny proficiency at netball, but her behaviour in form was such that, beyond recommending her to the notice of the Gymnasium Mistress (who immediately gave her a place in the school second team and declared that she was really good enough to play in the first), Miss Ferris ignored her when it was possible, reprimanded her when it was not, and, on this fateful Tuesday, the day of the dress-rehearsal of
The Mikado
, kept her in.

On any other day two things would have been certain. One was that Miss Ferris would not have kept her in, because any kind of punishment was against the tradition of the school; and, under Mr. Cliffordson's rule—he happened to be a genius in managing adolescent girls and boys—it is only fair to state that punishment was seldom necessary. The other thing was that it would not have mattered quite so much if she
had
kept her in, but this particular Tuesday was the day of the semi-final of the Schools Netball League, and the first team attacking centre was absent with a broken arm, consequently the girl Cartnell had been chosen by Miss Camden to fill the vacant position.

“And, between you and me,” Miss Camden had told the Headmaster, “we shall do better with Cartnell than with Poultney, for she's a far better player, although I don't agree with putting youngsters in the first team, really.”

The Headmaster, lacking interest in the subject, agreed absently.

To do Miss Ferris justice, she was not aware the the girl had been chosen to play in the match that day, but, having announced her decision, she declined to depart from it in spite of the victim's tearful reproaches. The rest of the lesson passed off in silence, Miss Ferris gloomily aware that she had put herself in a very delicate position but determined that she would not give way, the form—even the boys—oppressed by the atmosphere of misery, and the girl Cartnell moodily drawing on the outside cover of her pencil-work book and praying for Miss Ferris to be smitten by God. At the end of the lesson the child went straight to Miss Camden and informed that belligerent lady that she could not play in the match that afternoon.

“Why not?” demanded Miss Camden.

“Please, Miss Camden, I'm staying in for Miss Ferris until five o'clock.”

“Rubbish,” said Miss Camden, unwisely. “I'll speak to Miss Ferris. Go along now. I shall expect to see you at the school gate at three-thirty.”

The girl Cartnell went back to her class, which was prepared to take a geography lesson from Miss Freely, and managed to get a note passed round the form which ran thus:

She did not play after all. Miss Ferris, with a forcefulness which surprised herself, defended her position even when the case was taken before the Headmaster. The Headmaster, who thought the Gymnastic Mistress far too much interested in games to allow full scope to the ideals of the school, which might be summed up: “The individual first, the ‘team spirit' afterwards,” took the side of Miss Ferris, sent for the girl Cartnell, admonished her, sent for her arithmetic book, admonished her again when he had seen it, and kept her in his room from two o'clock until five doing arithmetic.

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. Everything, 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 ignored. 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: