Death at the Opera

The Junior Geography Mistress, Miss Freely, went hiking with a woman friend. They worked their way along the South coast from Hastings to Bournemouth, trekked through part of the New Forest, returned to London by way of Oxford, and stayed in the woman friend’s flat in Shepherd’s Bush for the remainder of the vacation.

There was only one member of the proposed cast for The Mikado who had no holiday at all. That was the schoolgirl, Moira Malley. She, poor child, took a job as private governess to two little children, It was the only means she had of getting to the seaside. As she was a resolutely optimistic person, she cried for the whole of the first night because her mother in Ireland could not afford to pay the fare which would have taken the girl to her home, and then cheered up and decided to enjoy the task of teaching and minding the two charming but badly spoilt young people whose parents were paying her five shillings a week for her services.

The Senior English Mistress, Mrs. Alceste Boyle, and the Senior Music Master, Mr. Frederick Hampstead, who was the producer and conductor respectively of the opera, were living in sin in Paris. They were enjoying themselves. Mr. Boyle was dead. Mrs. Hampstead was in a home for female inebriates. Both Mrs. Boyle and Mr. Hampstead, therefore, decided that they had a right to enjoy themselves, and as they had been in love with one another for longer than they could remember, they spent all their holidays together, but kept this fact a closely guarded secret.

It was their custom to choose always a very large and usually a foreign town, so that should they be unlucky enough to be seen in one another’s company by any other member of the staff, it could be assumed that they had encountered one another by accident. Thus they had lived together in London, New York, Barcelona, Vienna, Lisbon, Rome, Oslo, and other European and American cities, for more than a dozen summer holidays. Christmas they always spent together in London, and Easter in Seville or Rome. Their wants, except for the continual need of one another’s companionship both of body and mind, were infinitesimal.

They had managed to keep their secret so carefully that only one person on the staff guessed it. That was Calma Ferris, who, having no friends, had the more opportunity for observing the friendships of others. Neither Mrs. Boyle nor Mr. Hampstead had the slightest notion that Miss Ferris knew their secret. They were usually very careful at school, and, so far as they knew, had never betrayed themselves to a soul. They would have been horrified and amazed had they been permitted to read a certain page of Miss Ferris’s diary, which referred to Mr. Hampstead as “Mr. Rochester.” The knowledge that Hampstead’s wife was in some sort of mental institution had leaked out and was a subject of staff-room gossip when the senior members of the common-room were not present.

Hampstead was temperamental and really musical. Under Alceste Boyle’s inspiration and an assumed name he had published several minor works and a full symphony. The money he made, however, apart from his teaching, was negligible, and one of the most important reasons which he and Alceste shared for wishing to keep their illicit relationship secret was the fear of losing their posts. To do Mr. Cliffordson justice, he would never have dreamed of asking the board of governors to dismiss either of them. He neither approved nor disapproved of “free love” in itself, but he was a man who held strong views on the right of every human being to form his own code of behaviour, and as long as that code did not impair efficiency or act prejudicially to health and happiness, he would tolerate it gladly. Hampstead and Mrs. Boyle did not realize this. Perhaps, too, there was a certain charm about the secrecy of the whole thing. It was hidden treasure; the more valuable in their eyes simply because it had to remain hidden.

The person who ought to have been in the cast, but had had to give place to the mild and unassuming Miss Ferris, was the Physical Training Mistress. She had departed for Montreux in a very bad temper, stayed in Switzerland a fortnight, crossed into Italy and stayed on the shores of Lake Lugano, left because Lugano was full of elementary school-teachers, and went to Monte Carlo, where she lost heavily at the tables. She then wired her father for the money to return home, and spent the rest of the holiday writing letters and sulking in the garden of the vicarage in Shropshire, where her parents lived. She returned to school in a worse temper than that in which she had left at the end of term.

chapter ii: rehearsal

« ^ »

i

The autumn term took its usual course until the dress-rehearsal of The Mikado, or, more exactly, until the day upon which the dress-rehearsal was to take place. On that day Miss Ferris began badly by being late for school. She could not remember ever having been late before, but there was a certain amount of excuse which a more self-indulgent person might have made for herself.

On the previous evening her landlady had given her fish for supper. It was not fresh, and Miss Ferris had been kept awake the better part of the night by severe abdominal pains. She took some aspirin tablets—two, in point of fact —and towards morning she fell asleep. She was a person who liked between seven and eight hours’ sleep at night, and although, presumably, her alarum clock ran down at the usual time, it did not wake her, so it was past eight o’clock when her landlady knocked at the door to inform her that breakfast had been on the table upwards of ten minutes.

The consequences of all this was that Miss Ferris was hurrying into school at five minutes past nine, knowing that she was due for a severe attack of indigestion because she had bolted a breakfast consisting chiefly of sausages, and knowing also that she would consider it her duty to seek out the Headmaster and apologize for her unpunctuality. Mr. Cliffordson was urbane and sympathetic, but that did not comfort Miss Ferris, who was almost morbidly conscientious in all matters concerning school and her work there. She went to her first class feeling thoroughly out of tune with the day. Unfortunately, her first class was the Upper Third Commercial.

It often happens in a school that different children react upon different teachers in very different ways. On the whole, Miss Ferris escaped being ragged. She was sensible, kindly, had a strong parental instinct, and was sufficiently interested herself in her special subject to make it interesting and intelligible to the children. She was fortunate in that her subject happened to be Lower School arithmetic, for, in spite of assertions to the contrary by various eminent educationists, the fact remains that the majority of children under fourteen like arithmetic even when they are not particularly good at it.

But in the Upper Third Commercial, which was a form of thirteen-year-olds, there was a girl whom Miss Ferris disliked. She was an unpleasantly ferret-faced damsel, Cartnell by name, with stringy fair hair, impertinent grey eyes, a keen mind for which, so far, school work had provided little stimulus, and a flair for gymnastics. Miss Ferris, who occasionally coached the younger girls in the game, would have been prepared to take an interest in the girl because of her almost uncanny proficiency at netball, but her behaviour in form was such that, beyond recommending her to the notice of the Gymnasium Mistress (who immediately gave her a place in the school second team and declared that she was really good enough to play in the first), Miss Ferris ignored her when it was possible, reprimanded her when it was not, and, on this fateful Tuesday, the day of the dress-rehearsal of The Mikado, kept her in.