Death at the Opera (6 page)

Mr. Smith spoke to nobody. He was never very sociable at staff gatherings—he was an atheist with a slightly Epicurean bent and a keen appetite for good food; but Miss Ferris did not remember this. She felt certain that he was brooding over his ruined Psyche. She scarcely dared to look at him for fear that she should catch his eye and be compelled to meet the reproach in it.

Alceste Boyle was pouring out the tea. She spoke when she had to, but otherwise preserved a motherly silence which was quite companionable. One of her gifts was to be with a crowd of people, not to say anything, and yet to appear sociable and friendly. Frederick Hampstead laughed and joked, chiefly with Moira Malley, who was nervous but amused, and with Miss Freely, who was just a jolly girl, not long enough out of college to have acquired the hall-marks of her profession; perhaps too simple-hearted and human ever to acquire them. She seemed to be the only person present—except for Mr. Poole, who ate an enormous tea, and recited, between-whiles, the most atrocious limericks—who was wholeheartedly enjoying the party.

Even the Headmaster seemed
distrait
, and Mr. Kemball, the History Master, was downright morose, ate scarcely anything, refused a second cup of tea, and lighted his pipe, without asking permission and before anybody had finished eating. It was revealed later that his wife was expecting her third child. It was a joke among the men's staff that Kemball regarded his children as visitations of the wrath of God, refused to accept any personal responsibility for their appearance in the world, grumbled continuously at the provision he had to make for them, but spoke of children in general with self-conscious sentimentality, chiefly to curry favour with the Head.

The rehearsal, which was to be carried out in ordinary dress, and without make-up, began at half-past five. The Second Act was taken first, and, whether from nervous excitement or some other cause, Calma Ferris did exceptionally well. Her songs were good, and she spoke her lines better than she had ever done. Moira Malley, too, was successful that night, and when the Act was finished and Alceste Boyle suggested that the whole opera should be run through just once, if they all felt that there was time to do it, the company unanimously resolved to stay until eleven o'clock, if necessary. The whole thing went through without a hitch. Alceste Boyle affected to the Headmaster to be superstitiously inclined.

“Too good by half,” she said, laughing, as the players collected properties and cleared the stage. “Something is sure to go wrong to-morrow night! Or so Madame Berotti would say! Have you ever seen her act? She's old, of course, but
what
an artist!”

Calma Ferris, so delighted with her own successful performance that she forgot, for the time, her little nagging difficulties of the past day or two, had not the slightest premonition of disaster. She sat down before she went to bed, late though it was when she reached her lodgings, and recorded in her diary her pious hope that she would do as well on the morrow in her part as she had done that evening. Having blotted the entry carefully, she went to bed, and rose early in the morning to commence her last day on earth.

As a matter of historical accuracy, when dawned the Friday morning, the day of the performance, there were at least six people in school more perturbed than Calma Ferris. Hurstwood thought: “I wonder if she'll split to-day? She keeps looking at me. I wonder whether she's made up her mind yet? I wonder whether the Old Man will split to the governor if she splits to him? I wonder whether Gretta would care much if I got turfed out? Suppose the Old Man won't let me sit for the Schol.? Wish I had the guts to tackle Ferris and see what she means to do! I won't stick this much longer. Every time I look at Gretta now, or speak to her, I shall imagine that fool of a woman is sticking round, listening and snooping.”

Miss Cliffordson thought: “Uncle will never stand it. Out I shall go, and I couldn't stick teaching in any school but this. It's only just bearable here, and I do it frightfully badly, anyway. I don't believe any woman would have me on the staff for more than a fortnight. I wonder whether I'd better marry Tommy Browning and put myself out of pain? Besides, there's poor little Harry? Oh, hell and blast! What did she want to come poking round for, anyway? I suppose she's on the Vigilance Committee somewhere—or something!”

Mr. Smith thought: “Six months' work! Commissioned, too! How the devil am I going to pay Atkinson now? Serves me right for pinching school time, I suppose. If I'd done the stuff at home this couldn't have happened. Blast the woman, all the same! I couldn't have done it at home, anyway. The girl wouldn't have come.”

Miss Camden thought: “Just wait until I get the chance to pay you out, Ferris, my love! That's all! And I've
slaved
over the school netball.
Slaved
over it.”

Frederick Hampstead thought: “I suppose the Head will give me a testimonial before he sacks me. Or won't he? Better ask for it now, before that condemned female blows the gaff, I think. I'll see him during first lesson, when I haven't a class. He can't refuse if she hasn't said anything yet. Perhaps she'll keep her mouth shut, but I don't think I can stay. It'll be so difficult now.”

Alceste Boyle thought: “Why worry? She doesn't
know
anything, and, anyway, I think she's a good sort. It will damage Fred, not me, in any case. Thank God for widow-hood! But I wish she didn't know. It makes it in a way less wonderful, now someone knows.”

CHAPTER III

I

B
Y
half-past ten on the Friday morning Calma Ferris had something to think about other than school difficulties and problems. A telegram was handed in, which ran thus:

Several years of coping with arithmetical problems had sharpened Miss Ferris's wits, and a message which, to less well-trained senses, might have suggested the babblings of lunacy, resolved itself for her into the following perturbing set of ideas:

“Beware of the Mr. Helm from whose table you asked to be moved at the commencement of your summer holiday at your aunt's boarding-house. He is undoubtedly an imitator, if not an actual reincarnation, of George Joseph Smith, who was charged in the year 1915 for drowning three brides in the bath, and he has asked for the address of your school.”

The telegram bore her aunt's surname. Miss Ferris, who had lived the narrowest, safest and most sheltered of lives, was seriously upset by the message. Advice she felt she must have, and therefore five pairs of interested and four pair of anxious eyes noted that at recess, instead of taking coffee and biscuits in the staff-room, according to the time-honoured and civilized custom of the staff, she repaired to the Headmaster's study.

“So she's going to split,” thought Miss Cliffordson. “Oh, well!”

She meant to say something to Hurstwood when she got the chance. She wondered whether it would be compatible with her dignity as a member of the staff to suggest to the boy that they should both deny Miss Ferris's story, and rather reluctantly decided that it would not do. In less than three minutes, however, Miss Ferris returned to the staff-room. The Headmaster was engaged, and could not see her.

“So she's going to, but hasn't yet,” thought Frederick Hampstead. He shrugged. After all, what did she know? He and Alceste had always been so very careful. True, there had been those two mad evenings in the women's common-room, but surely nobody knew anything about those! And it had been unbearable that long, long autumn term, and there had been only the short Christmas holiday together at the end of it! And even that had been cut short by his having to go and see poor Marion in that ghastly private asylum which drained his resources so thoroughly. The remembrance of those two mad evenings worried him. They had flung caution to the winds on each occasion. They had been crazy.
Could
anybody have found out? A school was such a peculiar institution; and the staff had to be like Caesar's wife—above reproach. He had said to Smith on one occasion that it was a pity people did not fall into ornamental lakes when such were provided. There was an ornamental lake in the grounds of the asylum. . . . He regretted the ironic jest immediately he had made it and sincerely hoped that Smith would not refer to it again.

At any other time Miss Ferris might have shown the telegram to Alceste Boyle instead of to Mr. Cliffordson, but at the recollection of Alceste's words and look at the mention of Frederick Hampstead, she felt she did not dare to seek her sympathy or advice. No, she must wait until the Headmaster was less busy. During the next hour she could set a class to work some arithmetic examples, and perhaps go and see him. She felt, for the first time in her life, alone and unprotected. She had not forgotten Helm's invasion of her room on the night the burglars came, nor his subsequent impudent proposal of marriage.

She went to Mr. Cliffordson at about a quarter to twelve, and received advice and reassurance. Nobody saw her go, and Mr. Cliffordson did not mention to anybody at that time that she had visited him. He asked for, and received, a description of Mr. Helm, and when Miss Ferris had gone he chuckled. She seemed so extremely hard-boiled a virgin to be dreading unwelcome attentions from a man of the type he judged Helm to be.

The performance of
The Mikado
was timed to begin at half-past seven, and soon after seven the school hall was beginning to fill up. Masters and mistresses who were not in the opera were acting as stewards, and Alceste Boyle, as senior mistress and producer, was combining the delicate duties of welcoming the guests of importance and darting behind the scenes to make certain that all was going smoothly in readiness for the rise of the curtain.

Apart from the fusing of an electric wire which caused a five-minutes' delay in making up the women principals, nothing out of the ordinary happened until half-way through Act One. Alceste Boyle, who had decided not to add to the onerous office of producer the slighter one of call-boy, was informed by her small deputy, a child from the fourth form, that the “Katisha” was nowhere to be found. “She was dabbing her face in the water-lobby, but it's dark in there now.” Concluding that, wherever Miss Ferris might be, the probability was that she would return to the women principals' dressing-room before going on to the stage, Alceste sat down, and, because she was tired and because Calma Ferris's remark of the previous day had compelled her to face a fact which, for the sake of her sanity, she managed to ignore for the greater part of each term—namely that Frederick Hampstead never would and never could be hers unless his wife died—for he was a Catholic, and even an amendment of the divorce laws would have had no significance for him—she began to brood.

Five minutes went by, and there was no sign of Calma Ferris. The child came back and reported that she was still missing. Alceste had a sudden vision of her having been taken ill. She hastened down the corridor and pushed open the doors of the various rooms as she came to them. All were in darkness. At each door she called softly but distinctly:

“Are you in here, Miss Ferris?”

There was no answer. She switched on the lights of each room on her return journey, and glanced anxiously round each one. Teacher's desk on the rostrum, winter twigs in jam-jars on the window ledges, children's locker desks in orderly rows, wall blackboards, stock-cupboards, all the paraphernalia of class-room activities were there, but there was no sign of Miss Ferris. Puzzled, Alceste switched off the lights.

The only other player who had not yet been on the stage, and who, as a matter of fact, was not due to make his first entrance until Act Two, was the “Mikado” himself, the Senior Art Master, Mr. Smith. It occurred to Alceste Boyle that the two might be conversing, and that Calma might even now be on the opposite side of the stage, ready to make her entrance. A short transverse corridor made it possible to get to the other side of the school without crossing in front of the stage or going out of doors, so she slipped along this, and presently came upon Mr. Smith, who was enjoying a cigarette in the corridor and was talking to the electrician. She admonished him with a smile and in a whisper, for they were very near the stage, told him he would cough when he began to sing, and then asked him whether he had seen Miss Ferris anywhere.

He had not, and so, feeling irritated and worried, Alceste found a couple of chorus-people and sent them to assist in the search, while she herself hastily made her way into the darkened hall, found Miss Camden, who should have had the part of “Katisha” had not Calma Ferris financed the production of the opera, took her into the women principals' dressing-room and asked her to take the part.

Miss Camden declared she could not possibly go on like that at a moment's notice, and begged to be excused. Alceste let her return to the auditorium, collared the biggest girl in the chorus, borrowed her costume, got Madame Berotti to make her up very quickly for the part of “Katisha,” and, Calma Ferris having failed to materialize, went on at the end of the First Act, and, being by that time in a state of high nervous tension, justified her Irish blood by rising magnificently to the occasion and taking the part as poor Calma Ferris might have taken it in dreams but could never have managed to take it in reality.

The curtain fell to tremendous applause. Alceste had herself made up a little more carefully during the interval, and to all Miss Cliffordson's questioning she would only reply:

“Whatever has happened, she can't go on now. I shall have to finish.”

“But what on earth can have happened to the woman?” Miss Cliffordson persisted. Alceste, sacrificing her own good looks with every touch of grease-paint, in order to create successfully the illusion of “Katisha's” hideous Japanese countenance, shrugged one shapely shoulder, stood motionless while the last smears were added, and then went out to round up the chorus.