MIDNIGHT
‟WAKE up, Nita!”
Nita Anderson grunted and buried her dark head yet deeper in the pillow.
“The bell hasn’t gone yet,” she murmured. “Do go away and stop playing
the goat!”
“Well, if I do, you’ll get no supper,” said the caller, not ceasing to
be energetic. “Why, no self-respecting person goes to sleep at all
before a supper, and here you are, snoring like a hog!”
“I _don’t_ snore!” said Nita indignantly. She cast a wrathful glance at
her accuser.
“Thought that would fetch you!” said that damsel gaily. “But you can’t
be certain, and now you’ll never know! Hurry up, or all the éclairs will
be gone before you get there.” She capered off, and Nita, with a huge
yawn, jumped out of bed and sought for her kimono.
There were about a dozen girls in the room to which she found her way
presently. As a rule, midnight suppers were conducted in muffled tones,
the only illumination a candle-end, and enjoyment was heightened by the
knowledge that at any moment the dread form of a too-inquisitive
governess, or even of Miss Dampier herself, might appear. It lent zest
to the flavour of even a shop-made sausage-roll when you knew that you
might not, as Ellen Webster put it dramatically, “be spared to finish
it.” But to-night was different, by time-honoured custom. It was just at
the end of term, for one thing: for another, it was match night, and
every one knew that on match night Miss Dampier and the staff made a
practice of sleeping with such soundness that no untoward noises, such
as the popping of ginger-beer or lemonade bottles, or the clatter of
strange crockery hastily assembled as goblets, could shake their dreams.
Supper arrived almost openly on such nights, in proud hampers from home,
or tempting-looking parcels from the big shops in Melbourne: not
smuggled in in greasy paper bags, the contents of which were apt to
become flattened and crumby long before they were eaten. And, in
addition to sleeping soundly, no governess thought of alluding, next
morning, to heavy eyes or lessons half-prepared. Miss Dampier always
inculcated tact in her staff, especially in the last days of term.
There were four beds in the dormitory that Nita entered. One, smoothed
over and spread with newspapers, served as supper-table, while on a
chest of drawers were ranged the drinks: coffee, that had once been
iced, and was now faintly lukewarm—the night was a hot one in
December—raspberry vinegar, and a collection of “soft drinks” in
bottles. Each girl was supposed to bring her own tooth-glass; but there
had been a more surreptitious supper two nights before, at which several
of these useful articles had been broken, so that to-night there were
deficiencies which had to be filled by such substitutes as the cups of
thermos flasks. As may be imagined, a thermos cup is sadly insufficient
as a vessel for fizzy drinks; and bitter was the lot of those who
depended on them.
On her knees upon the floor, Helen Forester was laboriously dissecting a
large cold fowl. Her only weapon was a penknife, backed by brute force.
“This is a horrible job!” she observed to the company at large, raising
a flushed countenance. “I should like to wipe my heated brow, only my
hands are too greasy. Nita, you’re great on physiology—do come and tell
me where this animal’s joints are.”
“Get his side-fixings off,” counselled Nita, coming to her assistance.
“You hold one leg and wing firmly, and I’ll hold the others, and we’ll
pull. Something’s sure to come apart!”
Something did. Nita surveyed the dismembered bird with satisfaction.
“There!” she said. “That’s much simpler. Now you just go ahead and dig
in here and there till you weaken the general resistance of the
creature, and I’ll get the leg-joints apart.”
“It sounds simple, but when you come to reality you need an axe!” said
Helen. “I suppose if one scrapes the bones until there’s nothing left on
them one needn’t bother about getting inside?”
“Indeed, there’s the stuffing—or should be,” said Nita, wrestling
gallantly with the leg-joint. At which Helen groaned, and fell to work
anew with her inadequate weapon.
“Father would shudder at the carving, but there’s nothing wrong with the
result,” she remarked placidly, sometime later. “After all, every one
seems to have got some, and I believe that it really needs a genius to
feed twelve people off one fowl!”
“Few could do it,” agreed Nita. “No one is sufficiently grateful to us,
of course, but——”
There was a chorus of dissent.
“We _loved_ watching you!” said Grace Farquhar, in her soft drawl.
“I haven’t a doubt of it,” Helen laughed. “Well, it’s something to have
been able to provide a circus before supper. Will anyone give me a
méringue? Thanks, Jo. Have one yourself.”
“I’ve had all that’s prudent, thanks,” Jo Weston answered. “Méringues
soon go to your head after you’ve been in strict training for tennis.
Did you get an éclair, Nita?”
“I did—thanks to you,” Nita laughed. “Nothing but the vision of missing
them would have dragged me from my pillow. I know your mother’s éclairs,
you see. When are you going to learn to make them, Jo?”
“Mother might teach me in these hols., she said,” responded Jo. “But
she’s not very keen on teaching us while we’re at school. She says we’re
to learn all the cookery and domestic science stuff we can from Miss
Smith, and she’ll see what it amounts to after we leave. Then she’ll
round off the corners.” She laughed. “Personally, I think she’ll find us
_all_ corners. Mother hasn’t got any degrees and letters after her name,
like the worshipful Smithy, but when it comes to running a house
practically, I think she’d leave her cold!”
“Oh, but who would expect Smithy to be practical?” demanded Grace. “She
looks so exquisite, and she wears such fetching uniforms, and she’s
terribly impressive; but you always have the feeling at the back of your
mind that she’d expire if the gas-stove wouldn’t act!”
“Yes—I’d love to see her reduced to the cooking outfit my grandmother
had in the bush,” said Helen. “Colonial oven—did any one of you ever
see one?”
There was a chorus of “No.”
“Just a big oven, built in between bricks; you put a fire underneath and
another on top. Then you had a couple of bars across the fire, and
balanced your saucepans on that. No pretty aluminium saucepans in those
days; just big heavy iron pots.”
“Gracious!” said the chorus.
“You ought to have heard my grandmother’s remarks on restaurant food,”
remarked Helen. “She used to expect to hear of Father’s death any minute
after she found that he had to get his lunch in Town every day. Say,
girls, I’m glad we don’t have to live up to our grandmothers. Mine used
to make all the family clothes—by hand, if you please, and you should
just have seen the tucks!—and do all the cooking, when they didn’t have
maids, and run the house, and doctor her own family and half the
district for fifty miles round, and take an odd turn at harvesting, or
bush-fire fighting, or cattle-mustering, or——”
“Oh, they _couldn’t_, Helen! It simply wouldn’t happen!”
“But it did! They fought blacks too sometimes on their own, when the
grandfathers were away; and they doctored injured cattle, and taught
their kiddies, and lots of ’em spun their own wool and knitted it. And
they kept up their accomplishments—painting, and music: Grannie played
the harp like fun, even when she was old. And they hadn’t any
labour-saving devices at all. What if any of us found ourselves up
against a job like that!”
“I’d be sorry for the person who expected _me_ to keep up
accomplishments while I made the family clothes by hand!” said Nita
firmly. “That would be sufficient accomplishment for _me_, thank you.
Anyhow, I agree we’re not what our grandmothers were. What are you going
to do when you leave, Grace?”
“Oh, I’m going to the Gallery,” Grace said. “If I can’t paint I can’t do
anything. Later on, if I show signs of its being worth while, they’ll
let me go to England to study. What about you?”
“Tennis, principally, I think,” said Nita, laughing. “I haven’t thought
of anything else. Golf too, I suppose. _And_ dances. I’m going to have a
good time for a while, anyhow. Don’t ask me to be serious, because it
simply can’t occur!”
“Hear, hear!” said several pyjama’d figures, with relieved accents.
There were others to whom the breaking of the school chain meant only “a
good time.” No one wanted to be serious.
“Well, I’m going to learn to run the house,” Helen said. “Mother says
so, and what she says generally happens. But we’re going to Ceylon for a
year first if we can depot Rex.”
“Who’s Rex?”
“My little brother. He hasn’t been strong, and the doctor doesn’t want
him to go to Ceylon. But he is a bit young for school—only nine. Aunt
Ada was to have taken charge of him, but now she is going to England
herself. However, I suppose we’ll find a home for him somewhere.”
“Ceylon for a year—how gorgeous!” said Jean Weston.
“Yes; I’m going to learn to plant tea,” laughed Helen. “If we have luck
we may go on to India: Father has cousins in Bombay. But there will be a
wonder-year, at any rate. What are you going to do, Jean? Of course I
know you’re not leaving yet.”
“Thank goodness, no!” Jean answered. “We wanted to go to school from the
time we were ten, and we didn’t go until we were over fourteen, so it
would be too awful to have only a year. We’re to be left to accumulate
learning until we’re eighteen, I believe!”
“You won’t be fit to know!” said Gladys Armstrong solemnly.
“That depends on how much we accumulate. Thank goodness Father isn’t a
bit keen on exams for us. We’re to learn French thoroughly, so’s we can
talk it if we ever get to France, and we’re to have a good sound
education without any frills, and all the domestic science Smithy can
pack into us. That’s Father’s idea: Mother stuck out for a few extras.
And they both want us to play all the games we can, barring football!”
“They sound extremely satisfactory parents,” said Grace, laughing.
“You ask Helen—_she_ knows them!” returned Jo defiantly.
“Why, they’re darlings: everybody knows _that_!” said Helen. “Mr. Weston
gave us—the twinses and Nita and me—a most gorgeous time when he came
to Town to sell his wool. Didn’t he, Nita?”
“Rather!” responded that damsel. “I wish he had wool to sell once a
month!”
“I’m afraid he won’t have much next year,” Jean said. “The drought is
pretty bad up our way; Mother’s letters seem a bit worrified.”
“I wish Miss Dampier could hear your new English,” said Ellen Webster.
“Well, if you say ‘horrified’ why shouldn’t you say ‘worrified,’ I’d
like to know?” Jo demanded. The twins always answered for each other.
“You might say ‘horrid’ to match ‘worried’ instead,” remarked Nita. “Why
not? Some day, when I’m not busy, I think I’ll make a new dictionary. I
know heaps of lovely words that no dictionary-maker ever dreams of
putting in.” She yawned. “But seriously, Jean, I hope your father isn’t
having a bad time. My uncle is up in your part of the country, and he
seems to be pretty hard hit by the drought.”
“Oh, Father is sure to be feeling it,” Jean said. “But I ’spect it will
be like other bad times: they come and go, you know, and everybody jogs
along just the same. Father always says one good year makes up for
several bad ones. But of course it makes you pretty blue to be living in
the middle of the drought, and seeing the sheep and cattle grow poorer
and poorer every day. I know what _that’s_ like. So Mother’s letters
can’t be very cheery.”
“Jean and I were looking forward to new saddles and riding-kit these
hols.,” Jo remarked. “Now I suppose they won’t be able to manage them
for us. But it never lasts long. Father will preach economy, and look
glum when the bills come in, and of course we’ll economize, somehow—but
he’d be awfully wild if he found Mother doing without anything she
really wanted! And then the rain will come, and everything will be all
right again.”
“You’re a cheery old optimist,” Gladys said, laughing.
“Well, isn’t life cheery? Things always come right again, if you give
them time—Mother says so, at any rate. We always have good times, don’t
we, Jo?” And Jo grinned at her twin, and said “Rather!”
“My father says,” observed Grace, “that you often get just what you’re
looking out for—if you make sure you’re going to have a bad time, it
comes, and if you make up your mind that everything will be delightful,
then that comes too.” She sighed. “I’ve tried to work out that theory
when I was going to the dentist—planned in my own mind that I was going
to have something between a pantomime and a picnic. It was, too, I
think, for the dentist. But not for me!” She sighed again.
Every one laughed, with a painful absence of sympathy.
“All the same, I believe in your father’s idea, though I think you tried
it pretty high,” remarked Helen. “I do think if you believe in your luck
it’s more likely to come than if you make up your mind that nothing will
go right. It’s the same with people: if you’re quite sure they are
decent, well they generally turn out decent.”
“That’s what Father says!” cried Jo. “He always believes every one’s all
right.”
“Then, when you get let down by some one who isn’t all right,” said
Grace—“well, you come with a bump!”
“That’s true, I suppose. But Father says he hasn’t had many bumps, and
on the whole he’d rather have had them than give up believing in people.
Anyhow, I believe in every one—except Miss Smith!”
“Well, go on believing—but keep your eyes about you next year, as
well,” said Helen, laughing. “You two will be seniors next year, and if
you’re not awfully careful you’ll be prefects before it’s over. A lot of
seniors are leaving, and Miss Dampier will be so hard up for prefects
that she may have to promote even graceless children like you!”
“Good—gracious!” said the twins, in tones of horror.
“It’s true. You can’t expect for ever to blush unseen in the murky
obscurity of the Middle School—’specially when you win tennis matches.
Miss Dampier has her eagle eye on you.”
“But—but——” gasped Jean, “we shan’t be sixteen until next year! And
you’re eighteen, Helen.”
“Well, I was a prefect when I was sixteen,” said the Captain, drawing
her dainty embroidered kimono round her. “So were Nita and Ellen. And
you two are higher in the school for your age than I was.”
“Yes, but you’ve often told us that, being twins, we’ve only sense
enough for one real person divided between us!” said Jo, amidst
laughter.
“That’s one of the ways in which one hatches sense in the young,” said
Helen. “I’ve told you lots of other things, for your souls’ good.
Captains have to.” She smiled at them very kindly; they looked such
scared children, so ridiculously alike, in their pyjamas, with their
hair tumbling about their flushed faces. “Oh, you’ll be terrors to the
wicked juniors when you’re prefects, because they’ll never know which of
you they’re talking to! Fancy being quite certain you’d dodged one of
the Powers That Be, and then seeing her double stalk out before you!”
“I see a vision!” remarked Ellen Webster solemnly. “Two years hence, you
and Nita and I will re-visit the old school and tread the familiar
paths, once desecrated by the pelting feet of graceless twinses. And lo!
we will see droves of demure juniors, damsels without guile——”
“There ain’t none such!” said Nita.
“—and older damsels of staid, not to say cowed, aspect; and at the
head, two goddess-like figures—
‘So like they were, men never
Saw twins so like before’—
bearing badges of office, and walking statelily Even the Fifth, that
band without reverence, will tremble at their gaze. Slowly,
majestically——”
The orator’s voice died away in a pained gurgle. One twin seized her
suddenly from the rear, and tilted her backwards, while the other
pressed to her face a large, wet sponge. It was almost dry when the
ensuing struggle was over, and most of the water it had contained was
distributed evenly over Ellen and the twins.
“Ugh!” said Ellen, abandoning all oratory. “You little fiends!” She
wriggled in her wet pyjamas.
“It’s a nice warm night for a bath!” said Nita, weak from laughing.
“Yes, but this only feels clammy. You two, prefects! You’ll never be
anything but disgraces!”
She glared at the twins, capering safely in the distance, soaked and
cheerful. Certainly, there was nothing about them that suggested
prefectorial dignity. They danced in a manner only possible in those who
have no responsibility.
“I believe you’re right,” laughed Helen. “Anyhow, it’s a good thing it’s
match night, or you’d certainly have had Miss Dampier in here. And you
three are far too wet to sit up any longer: come and clear up the wreck.
Who’s going to dispose of the chicken-bones?”