She moved quietly towards the dressing-table, where her handbag lay, and was about to open it when there came three quiet but distinct taps upon her bedroom door. Miss Ferris started with surprise, but she put down the handbag, pulled her dressing-gown about her and opened the door. A man pushed past her without ceremony, opened her window wide, climbed on to the balcony, and apparently, from the sounds, dropped into the garden below. Miss Ferris took the whistle from her handbag, leaned out of the wide-open window and blew three shrill blasts. There was a rush of feet, a warning shout, and the sound of a motor-horn from the front of the house. Below Miss Ferris’s eye-level a dark object appeared. Miss Ferris shouted:
“Stop, or I’ll fire!”
“It’s me,” said the voice of the handsome middle-aged man. “They’ve got away.”
By this time the sounds of an awakened household reached their ears. Lights were being switched on. They could hear voices.
“Go back,” said Miss Ferris. “You can’t use my room again.”
The dark man, however, climbed back again and closed the window. Miss Ferris opened the bedroom door, to find Miss Sooley and her aunt upon the threshold.
“They’ve got away,” she said to her aunt.
Nothing, upon investigation, proved to have been stolen. The cough which had first attracted Miss Ferris’s attention had been the undoing of the burglars, who were in the act of forcing an entrance. But Miss Ferris and Mr. Helm were the heroine and hero respectively of the boarding-house, Miss Ferris’s aunt, who was deeply shocked, excluded. Mr. Helm was leaving at the end of the week, but they were sufficiently well acquainted for him to propose marriage to Miss Ferris, and to be refused. Calma Ferris was under no illusion as to her attraction for a man of Mr. Helm’s appearance and character.
“I fancy he thought I might have expectations,” she confided to her landlady when she got back. “And so I have,” she added. She so seldom confided in anybody that it was a relief to have this woman to talk to. “My aunt who keeps the boarding-house is making me the principal beneficiary under her will. It’s rather exciting, isn’t it? I’ve to give up teaching and carry on the boarding-house; but I should like to do that, I think. It would be a change; and, anyhow, I hope my dear aunt has many years of life before her yet.” iv
Hurstwood was feeling decidedly ill-used. He was just eighteen, and his father had decided to leave him at school another six months, so that he might work for a Balliol scholarship. Hurstwood, a brilliant, restless, ambitious boy nearly at the top of his form, would not have been ill-pleased at this arrangement had events pursued their normal course, but events had not seen fit to do so. The disadvantage of making games a matter of secondary instead of primary importance in the school world is that it is exceedingly difficult, especially in the case of adolescent boys, to find anything quite to take their place.
Hurstwood, temperamentally incapable of absorbing himself in a hobby, and possessing all the instability of character common to one type of clever boy, had let his hobby of photography fall into abeyance and had occupied the whole of the previous term in falling in love. His love was sincere, painful and apparent. He had fallen in love with the Junior Music Mistress, who, in her flighty way, was touched, flattered and embarrassed. The poor youth had had to content himself, through shyness, with a kind of silent worship, but he had managed to dance with her three times at the end-of-term social, and his mental state was obvious.
His work suffered, and his end-of-term report had been sufficiently coolly worded for his father to cancel the motor tour which he had proposed to his son earlier in the year and condemn the boy to eight weeks of sea air coupled with mild exercise. Mr. Hurstwood, a mild-mannered but obstinate man, was convinced that his boy had been overworking; hence not only Bognor but also the straw hat.
To complete young Hurstwood’s irritation, whom should he encounter during the first week of the holiday but Miss Ferris. The thought that, if any member of the staff had to spend a holiday at the same place as his father had chosen, it might just as easily have been Miss Cliffordson, caused him to grind his teeth with disappointment. He used to stay out of bed for hours, far into the night, and gaze at the sea—unlike Miss Ferris, the Hurstwoods had rooms on the front, and Hurstwood’s bedroom was high up, but at the front of the house—and think long, long, agonising thoughts about Miss Cliffordson and of how utterly unattainable she was.
He was exceedingly unhappy, and looked it. His father was extremely worried, and even wrote to the school to suggest that he should be let off work at the midday until half-term, to see if that would do him any good. The letter was forwarded to Mr. Cliffordson at Aix-les-Bains, and was thrown by him jovially into the waste-paper basket. He wanted to forget school. Time enough to be bothered with parents and their peculiarities when the new term began.
Miss Cliffordson was not spending the vacation with her uncle. She was cruising in northern waters, and more evenings than not she danced with the officers, and thought how pleasant they were, and how nice it would be to marry one if only they were better paid. She had been engaged twice before in her short life, and had enjoyed the experience. She was not entirely heartless, but she had weighed life in the balance, like most of her generation, found it wanting, and was out for as easy a journey through it as was to be obtained.
There was another besides Hurstwood who thought a good deal about her, however, and that was young Mr. Browning, the Junior English Master. He was spending his holiday fishing, and had plenty of time for thought. Unlike Hurstwood, he was not unhappy; he was determined. He was twenty-seven, and had his eye on the headship of a small grammar school in the Midlands. He was also a novelist, so far unpublished, and was optimistic on the subject of his own future, both as a pedagogue and a man of letters.
He had decided views on marriage, and considered it the duty of every schoolmaster to embark upon the joys and responsibilities of matrimony as early in his career as was compatible with earning sufficient money to keep a wife and family. He spent a pleasant, restful, health-giving holiday, and in the seventh week of it wrote to the Headmaster at Aix-les-Bains for a testimonial. The Headmaster, who wanted to forget school, threw the letter into the waste-paper basket and hummed a lively tune.
Mr. Smith, the Art Master, and little Mr. Poole, the Mathematics Master, were spending the holiday on a cargo-boat which went as far eastward as the Piraeus. Mr. Smith painted and sketched and smoked and talked; Mr. Poole helped in the engine-room and won a good deal of money at poker. Neither of them thought about school. At Marseilles a French sailor knifed Mr. Smith in the arm, and Mr. Poole, displaying a side of his character which his colleagues would not have recognised, sailed into the man and laid him out. They escaped to their ship, guided by a woman of the town who had been the original cause of the dispute, and were cursed heartily by the captain, who was a quarter of an hour late in getting away.
The History Master took lodgings in London, in order to get six weeks’ reading at the British Museum for a school text-book he was writing. At the end of the six weeks he took his wife and two children to Ramsgate for the duration of the holiday.
