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 t.i.tled 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 nutsh.e.l.l. 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 _n.o.blesse 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 "c.o.c.k-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 superst.i.tious 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.