FAIR FIGHTING
The weeks flew by. There had been no clue to the mystery of that torn
book which had Amelia Herschstein’s name written inside the cover, and
in the rush of other things the matter had been nearly forgotten by most
of the girls. The Head and Miss Groome did not forget; but whereas Miss
Groome frankly admitted herself scared stiff by the uncanny character of
the find, and refused to be left alone in the sitting-room on the upper
floor when the others had gone to bed, the Head got into the habit of
walking quietly up the stairs most nights, going along the passage,
opening the doors of the different rooms, and coming down the other
stairs.
She meant to get to the bottom of the mystery somehow, but so far she
had not found much reward for her searching. When the governors had
arrived on their monthly visit to the schools, and had come to lunch
with the girls, she had invited the unsuspecting gentlemen into her
private room, and had led the talk to the days of the past, and then had
put a few searching questions about the tragedy of Amelia Herschstein,
asking who she was, and how it came about that such an accident
occurred. To her surprise she found they resented her questioning, and
her attempts to get information drew a blank every time.
Then she took her courage in her hands, and faced the three gentlemen
squarely. “The fact is,” she said, speaking in a low tone, “I am up
against a situation which fairly baffles me. If you had been willing to
talk to me about this affair of the tragic fate of the poor girl, I
might not have troubled you with my worries, or at least not until I had
settled them. I have found that Amelia is said to walk in the upper
passage where the studies are. This has the one good effect of making
the Sixth Form girls very ready to go to bed at night. But I find that
the mistresses do not take so much pleasure as formerly in their private
sitting-room, which is, as you know, also on that passage. Then a week
or two ago a girl, alone in a study up there, was frightened by the
sensation of something coming; she saw the handle of the door turn, and
the door come gently open for a little way. I am sorry to say she did
not stay to see what would happen next, but bolted downstairs to the
dorm as fast as she could go. The strange part of the affair was that
there was found among that girl’s books next morning a torn old book, a
key to the Latin just then being studied by the Form, and the name
inside the book, written in faded ink across the inside of the cover,
was Amelia Herschstein.”
“Whew!” The exclamation came from the most formal looking of the
governors, and taking out his handkerchief he hurriedly mopped his face
as if he was very warm indeed.
“You understand now why I am anxious to know all there is to be known
about the tragedy.” The Head looked from one to the other of the three
gentlemen as she spoke, and she noted that they seemed very much upset.
“It was a case which landed the school in heavy trouble,” said the
formal man, after a glance at the other two as if asking their consent
to speak. “It was proved pretty clearly from things which came out at
the inquest, and what the soldier afterwards admitted, that it was not
because she had fallen in love with him that Amelia arranged meetings
and talks with this soldier. She was trying to get from him details of a
government invention on which he had been working before he came to
Beckworth Camp. Now, a love affair of that sort was bad enough for the
reputation of the school, but can you not see how infinitely worse a
thing of this kind will prove?”
“Indeed I can.” The Head was frankly sympathetic now, and she was taking
back some of the hard thoughts she had cherished against the unoffending
governors.
“It was proved, too, that the father of Amelia had been in the German
Secret Service,” went on the formal man. “Consideration for the feelings
of the bereaved parents stopped the authorities from taking further
proceedings. The soldier, a promising young fellow, and badly smitten by
the young lady who was trying to make a tool of him, was sent to India
at his own request, and was killed in a border skirmish a few months
later. You understand now how it is we do not care even among ourselves
to talk of the affair.”
“I do understand,” the Head replied. “But what you have told me does not
throw any light on the mystery of how that book came to be with Dorothy
Sedgewick’s things in the No. 1 study.”
“It only points to the probability of some of Amelia’s kin being in the
school, and if that is found to be the case they will have to go, and at
once.” The formal man shut his mouth with a snap as if it were a rat
trap, and the Head nodded in complete understanding.
“Yes, they would certainly have to go,” she said, and then she deftly
turned the talk into other channels; and being a wise, as well as a very
clever woman, she saw to it that the cloud was chased from their faces
before they went away.
Now she knew where she stood, and it was with a feeling of acute relief
that she set herself to the business of finding out the source from
which that torn book came. The first thing to do was to have a talk with
Miss Groome. Her lip curled scornfully as she recalled the terror
displayed by the Form-mistress. Of what good was higher education for
women if it left them a prey to superstitious fears such as might have
oppressed poor women who had no education at all?
* * * * *
A big hockey match was engrossing the attention of every one during the
last week in November. It was big in the sense of being very important,
for they were to play against the girls of the Ilkestone High School,
and the prestige of the school with regard to hockey would hang on the
issue of the game.
It was the only game Dorothy played at all well; she was good at
centring, and she was not to be beaten for speed. The games-mistress
wanted her for outside right, and Dora Selwyn, who was captain, agreed
to this. But she exacted such an amount of practice from poor Dorothy in
the days that came before the one that was fixed for the match that
other work had to suffer, and she had to face the prospect of her school
position going down still lower.
Never once since that affair of finding the torn book among her things
had Dorothy been able to reach the fourth place in her Form. The next
week she had been fifth again, with Rhoda once more above her, and the
week after that she had suffered most fearfully at finding Joan Fletcher
also above her. All this was so unaccountable to her because she knew
that she was working just as hard as before.
Sometimes she was inclined to think she was being downed by
circumstances. She was like a person being sucked down in a
quagmire—the more she struggled the lower down she went.
Of course this was silly, and she told herself that despair never led
anywhere but to failure.
Her keenest trouble was that she knew herself to be, by some people, a
suspected person—that is to say, there were some who said that she must
have used cribs in the past, which accounted for her failures now that
she might be afraid to use them. There was this good in the trouble,
that it made her set her teeth and strive just so that she might show
them how false their suppositions were.
The reason her position had dropped was largely due to the fact that the
other girls had worked so much harder. The words of the Head concerning
the position of slackers had fallen on fruitful ground. No girl wanted
to be looked upon as having used cribs to help her along. The others,
all of them, had the advantage of being used to the work and routine of
the Compton School. Dorothy, as new girl, was bound to feel the
disadvantages of her position.
Rhoda Fleming had a vast capacity for work, and she had also a heavy
streak of laziness in her make-up. Just now she was working for all she
was worth, and the week before the hockey match she rose above Margaret,
who seemed to shrink several sizes smaller in consequence. She had to
bear a lot of snubbing, too, for so elated with victory was Rhoda, that
she seemed quite unable to resist the temptation of sitting on Margaret
whenever opportunity occurred.
It pleased Rhoda to be quite kind, even friendly, to Dorothy, who did
not approve the change, and was not disposed to profit by it.
Two days before the hockey match Rhoda, encountering Dorothy who was
lacing her hockey boots, offered to help with her work.
“I can’t bear to see you slipping back week by week,” she said with
patronizing kindness. “Of course you are new to things. There is that
paper on chemistry that we have to do for to-morrow’s lab work—can I
help you with that?”
Dorothy stared at her in surprise, but was prompt in reply. “No, thank
you; I would rather do my work myself.”
“Yet you use cribs,” said Rhoda with an ugly smile.
Dorothy felt as if a cold hand had gripped her. “I do not!” she said
quietly, forcing herself to keep calm.
Rhoda laughed, and there was a very unpleasant sound in her mirth.
“Well, you don’t seem able to prove that you don’t, so what is the good
of your virtuous pose? If your position drops again this week, don’t say
I did not try to help you.”
The incident caused Dorothy to think furiously. She was sure that Rhoda
had, somehow, a hand in her position dropping. Was it possible that she
was boosting Joan Fletcher along in order to lower Dorothy, and so make
it appear that there could not be smoke without a fire in the matter of
that old book?
She broke into a sudden chuckle of laughter as she sat on the low form
in the boot-room lacing up her second boot. Rhoda had departed, and she
believed herself alone. Then along came Margaret, wanting to know what
the joke was; and leaning back with her head against the wall and her
boot laces in her hand, Dorothy told her of Rhoda’s kind offer, and the
threat which followed.
“Bah! it is a fight, is it?” cried Margaret. “Well, let them rise above
us week by week if they want to. But, mind you, Dorothy, we have got to
keep our end up somehow. Hazel and I have been going through the
marks—dissecting them, you know—and we find that both you and I have
made our steady average week by week; we have not fallen back—it is the
others who have pulled up. Hazel says she is pretty sure that Rhoda will
pull above her next week. There is one comfort—it is awfully good for
Miss Groome; and I am sure the poor thing looks as if she needs a little
something to cheer her up, for she does seem so uncommonly miserable
this term—all the fun is clean knocked out of her.”
“I wish we could work harder,” grumbled Dorothy. “Oh, this hockey match
is a nuisance! Just think what a lot of time it wastes.”
“Don’t you believe it, old thing,” said Margaret. “It is hockey, and the
gym, and things of that sort that make it possible for us to swot at
other things. It makes me mad to hear the piffle folks talk about the
time at school that is wasted on games. If the people who talk such rot
had ever worked at books as we have to work they would very soon change
their tune.”
“Oh! I know all that.” Dorothy’s tone was more than a trifle impatient,
for she was feeling quite fed-up with things. “My complaint is that
hockey makes me so tired; I am not fit for anything but to go to sleep
afterwards.”
“Just so. And isn’t that good for you?” Margaret wagged her head with an
air of great understanding. “Before I came here—when I was working for
the scholarship—I should as soon have thought of standing on my head in
the street as wasting my precious time on games. The result was that I
was always having bad headaches, and breaking down over my work; and I
used to feel so wretched, too, that life seemed hardly worth living.
Indeed, I wonder that I ever pulled through to win the scholarship.”
“All the same, this match is an awful nuisance,” grumbled Dorothy; and
then she was suddenly ashamed of her ill-temper and her general tendency
to grouch.