Malice in Wonderland

by Nicholas Blake

  Taking the note-book, Paul strolled out of his chalet and made for the manager’s office. He was not a little pleased with his own share of the questionnaire and the way he had managed to legalise his investigation. He also gave credit to Miss Jones for so skilfully bringing the Mad Hatter business into the open, for neutralising his fantastic activities through the medium of impersonal statistics and thus helping to preserve the visitors’ confidence and good humour: Captain Wise was not the only psychologist on the Wonderland staff.

  Captain Wise glanced through the questionnaire with the kind of eye that adds up three columns of figures simultaneously. Almost at once his pencil came down on question (vi).

  “Whose idea was this — suggesting that the Mad Hatter might be a stunt of the management’s? Surely we don’t want to put a notion like that into their heads?”

  “I suggested it,” said Miss Jones crisply. “I heard one or two of the visitors advancing it as a theory, and the best way to show up the absurdity of it is to put it down in black and white.”

  “Mm. Well, let it stand. I think we should insert a question asking them whether they’ve seen or heard anything suspicious that might be connected with the practical jokes. People might be more willing to write that kind of thing down than come to me in person about it.”

  “I thought of that. But wouldn’t it be fatal to give them the impression that they’re set to spy on one another?”

  “Nonsense, Miss Jones. There’s no spying about it. Anyway, I’ve already asked for such information, when I made my announcement at lunch. Put it in.”

  Odd, reflected Paul, the way he defers one minute and asserts himself the next. He must be fundamentally a weak character. The weak character turned to Paul:

  “Very interesting, your part of it. Results might be informative for myself, too. Mind if I looked at them when they come in?”

  “Well, I don’t know whether——”

  “Call it a bit of research on the company’s behalf. Give you free drinks during your stay here,” suggested Captain Wise outrageously.

  “Really! It’s not a matter of having to be bribed——” Paul began; then, catching a mischievous glance from Esmeralda Jones, seeing her firm, red lips beginning to form the word “prig,” he stopped short. “I tell you what,” he said. “Let’s swap information. I’ll show you the answers to my part of the questionnaire if you show me yours.”

  It was Captain Wise’s turn to look dubious. He tapped the pencil against his regular, white teeth. “I suppose there’d be no harm in it,” he said at last, “provided you treated it as strictly confidential. What do you think, Miss Jones?”

  “I see no objection. It’s irregular, I suppose: but the Mad Hatter’s a bit irregular too.”

  “I suppose we can take it that you aren’t the Mad Hatter yourself?” he asked, giving Paul one of his quick, jovial grins.

  “You’ve only my word for it,” replied Paul, very much aware of the shrewdness behind the manager’s good-humoured gaze.

  “Very well, then.” Captain Wise turned to the questionnaire again. “Now is there anything we should add to this before we put it out?”

  “I’d like to make a suggestion,” said Miss Jones. “If Mr. Perry’s willing, could we have one more question in the second part? Something on these lines: If you were the Mad Hatter, what single practical joke could you imagine playing which would most disorganise the life of the camp?

  “The Mad Hatter, whoever he is, may quite likely fill in the questionnaire himself. He’s evidently a bit of an exhibitionist, and he might be tempted to answer that question with particulars about a joke he really does intend to play. As a sort of dare. If he did, we should be that much forewarned. In any case, the answers would give us some idea of the sort of things we may have to guard against. My own belief is that the joker’s only just getting into his stride, and he’ll be working up to something really big.”

  “You’re very pessimistic about him, Miss Jones. Getting rattled?”

  “I’ve a job to hold down, Captain Wise,” she replied tartly.

  “All right, then. Put it in as question (ix), and make the one about their name, age, etc., number (x). Heaven knows what the directors’ll say when they hear about this questionnaire—it’s damned unconventional, to say the least. Let’s hope the Mad Hatter’ll be scared off now he realises we’re taking him seriously.”

  Captain Wise shot his cuff with a gesture that indicated dismissal, revealing a small, expensive-looking gold wrist-watch. “Better start the great presses turning, Miss Jones. Thanks for your help, Perry: I’ll trot you out at dinner to-night.…”

  The little procession that, a couple of hours later, visited each of the two dining-halls consisted of Captain Wise, Paul Perry, Esmeralda Jones carrying the questionnaire papers and the sealed envelopes for the treasure-hunt, and four of the Wonderland staff who would be distributing them. Captain Wise made one of his short, adroit speeches, which allowed neither the diners’ interest nor their food to grow cold. Paul, concealing a certain bashfulness beneath a severely professional façade, was introduced in his true colours. Explaining the objects of the two parts of the questionnaire, Captain Wise emphasised that there was not the least compulsion on anyone to fill it in, but asked them—if they did so—to do it seriously and without consulting other people about their answers.

  His speech aroused a noticeable flutter of curiosity and animation in each of the dining-halls. Mr. Thistlethwaite was heard to pronounce the proceeding an eminently democratic one: several girls squeaked coyly when the name of the Mad Hatter was mentioned; and the schoolmistress, Miss Gardiner, began to give her table a lecture on the workings of Mass Observation. Like the good showman he was, Captain Wise did not linger after he had made his speech, but marched quickly out of the hall, leaving the atmosphere of curiosity intact and his attendants to distribute the papers.

  These were still much in evidence at the Guests’ Concert, which took place an hour later. Concerts in Wonderland were of two kinds: every week one was given by the dance band, members of the staff, and a radio or vaudeville star hired for the occasion, and one by the guests themselves. This evening, dotted about the audience in the concert hall, visitors could be seen gripping song-sheets in perspiring hands or furtively blowing down wind instruments. Miss Jones had told Paul that there was seldom any difficulty in filling a programme from the local talent, and much of it was real talent too. It contradicted the statement so commonly made by cultural pundits to-day that the radio has killed musical initiative; this pleased Paul, who believed that not the least important function of Mass Observation was to puncture the generalisations and wishful thinking of cultural pundits.

  Paul was gratified, too, by the stir his own appearance created amongst the audience. Heads were raised from the questionnaire papers, ribs were nudged. Paul, in a small way, had become a public figure. Unconsciously assuming a preoccupied, professional manner, he slipped modestly into a seat in a side aisle towards the back. A voice beside him said:

  “Good evening, Mr. Perry.”

  He turned to find it was an angular, spotty, over-powdered girl, who was gazing at him with a blend of painful shyness and stern resolution.

  “I hope you don’t mind my speaking to you—— Oh, my name’s Arnold, Phyllis Arnold, and this is my friend Janice Mears—you see, we had a discussion at my Left Book Club circle about Mass Observation and we didn’t seem able to make up our minds whether it was a good thing or not—I mean, I think the idea’s good, it’s scientific after all, isn’t it?—but some of your pamphlets—well, they make ordinary people, people like me, sound so silly and ignorant—the answers they give to Observers. Of course, I’m not working-class myself, but I’m sure there are lots of people like me who think about political and sociological questions, and your Observers never seem to meet anyone except sort of lumpen-proletariat or bourgeois elements who haven’t an idea in their heads except having a good time.”

  Miss Arnold pause
d, from lack of breath rather than of matter.

  “Perhaps you’re right. But the conversations in our surveys are all reproduced verbatim as far as possible. It isn’t so much that people don’t think as that they’re inarticulate, perhaps. You’re an exception to that, Miss Arnold.”

  The girl blushed unbecomingly, and seemed to be struck dumb by her own audacity in having addressed him.

  “I’m surprised to meet you here,” Paul went on, attempting a lighter note. “I should have thought you’d have been at a Left Book Club summer school.”

  “I did go to one once. But a lot of it was above my head, to tell you the truth. Besides,” she added defiantly, “it’s rather preaching to the converted, isn’t it? There are far more opportunities here.”

  “I think this is a lovely place,” Janice Mears said. She had a pretty, baby face, and a ribbon tied in a bow above her elaborate curls.

  “This hall, you mean?”

  “Oh, everything. It’s all so big and sumptuous, like on the movies. A veritable fairyland, I call it. Why, the palais-de-dance at home isn’t in it and we always used to think that pretty keen. And having people to wait on you, and wonderful meals, and private gardens to walk in—it’s like being in a movie yourself.”

  Paul was taking rapid mental notes: this was right down his street. His eye took in the concert hall, whose height was emphasised by the severity of its lines, the walls sparely decorated in abstract patterns, the Wurlitzer towering above the platform.

  “D’you think the Mad Hatter will do anything to-night, Mr. Perry?” asked Janice Mears.

  “I shouldn’t think there’s much scope for him here.”

  “I think it’s daft, acting like that. Anyway, I’m not going to let him spoil my holiday.”

  And so say all of them, thought Paul. The Mad Hatter would have to adopt sterner measures if he wanted to get people like these on the run.

  Teddy Wise was on the platform. “Folks,” he called, “lend me your ears. We’ve got a wealth of talent here to-night, and I believe it’s going to be the best guest-concert of the season. The first item on the programme is”—he glanced again at the paper in his hand—“is an old English folk-song, ‘I Will Give My Love An Apple,’ sung by one of our leading amateur basses, Mr. Bernard Scripps. Mr. Scripps, forward please.”

  A large man, with a bald, conical-shaped head and ragged fringe of moustache, took up his stance on the platform amid applause. The accompanist sat down at the piano, arranged the music, cracked her finger-joints. Mr. Scripps’ moustache waved out gently, like a curtain in a draught, as he exhaled a few deep breaths. Then he nodded to the pianist. He struck an attitude, she the opening chord.

  “Glug,” said the piano.

  Mr. Scripps plunged manfully into the song. His voice was of a terrific resonance, and he let them have it full organ at the start, his moustache agitated like a reed-bed in a hurricane.

  “I will give my lerv an erple,” he thundered.

  “Glug glock cluck glug glug,” announced the piano.

  Everyone was staring at the pianist who was desperately picking at the keys. Roiling his eyes like a terrified horse, Mr. Scripps persisted: but singing to that extraordinary accompaniment was like trying to walk through a morass. After the first stanza, he frankly gave it up. The accompanist, almost in tears, beckoned him, and they peered together into the vitals of the instrument.

  The Mad Hatter certainly had not had much scope in this austere hall. Short of poisoning the performers, there was nothing for him to do except tamper with the piano. And this he had done with considerable effect. He had treated it generously to treacle.

  VI

  AT 7.50 THE next morning, Sally Thistlethwaite came awake from a lurid but not altogether unpleasing dream whose leit motif had been a duel fought between Teddy Wise and Paul Perry. Like a running fight in a gangster film, this duel had changed locale with bewildering speed. At one moment, the combatants were assaulting each other with beach-balls, egged on by a bevy of glamorous bathing belles: the next, they were far out to sea, flailing about in water that rapidly assumed the colour and consistency of treacle: this naval battle, in turn, faded into a land engagement—Mr. Perry, entrenched behind a Maginot Line of grand pianos and wearing a top hat with a ticket in it, bombarding Mr. Wise with tennis-balls that burst into showers of questionnaire papers. Captain Wise figured intermittently, playing the rather harassed rôle of a referee at an all-in wrestling match. Other figures, too, flitted about on the outskirts of the dream—notably that of Miss Jones, who showed herself consistently in colours of gross treachery and partisanship, like a goddess in some Homeric combat. The duellists themselves evidently had all the arts of Proteus at their finger-tips, for each of them found no difficulty in turning into Mr. Thistlethwaite, a serpent, King Edward VII, a variety of domestic animals, the principal of Sally’s secretarial college, and even into Sally herself.

  Not being of an introspective turn of mind, the girl did not ask herself why the feeling of warm gratification should persist after she had awoken, but was content to enjoy it. She stretched herself on the Sleepeesi mattress which fulfilled all the promises of the Wonderland brochure, flung off the bedclothes, and dabbled her toes in the stream of sunlight that poured through the open window. Another fine day. The treasure-hunt. Even if it rained, there’d be plenty to do here: she had not tried the rifle range yet, or the ping-pong tables; and there was the cabaret show organised by the women visitors—she’d have a part in that.

  If only these silly practical jokes didn’t go on. They were so childish. Wasn’t it perhaps one of the kids in the camp, or a gang of them? No, of course: the hands which had gripped her ankles and pulled her down so cruelly under the sea had not been a child’s hand. Besides, there was what Daddy had said last night after the concert. He didn’t believe it was a practical joker at all. Teddy Wise had been saying how strange it was that no one had come forward with information—in a camp of five hundred people you’d expect there to be lots of gossip. Then Paul Perry said it was because everyone had plenty to do here: gossip was the recreation of those who couldn’t afford any other pleasures: or some high-brow remark like that. And Daddy said, didn’t the same thing apply to the Mad Hatter? No one would indulge in practical joking for its own sake when there was so much ordinary fun to be had here. Paul said this was a false analogy—he would dig up some impossible dictionary word. Then Daddy got very mysterious and said he had a theory, anyway, and he’d prove there was calculated, cold-blooded malice behind the Mad Hatter’s tricks. It had made her own blood run cold for a moment, the way he said it.

  Well, whoever he was, he’d been a damp squib so far. Duckings and treacle wouldn’t go very far, if he really wanted to wreck people’s holiday. Of course, the piano business had annoyed the visitors all right. There’d been mutterings about why the management didn’t take more efficient precautions: surely it ought to be easy enough to catch a chap who wandered about with a great tin of treacle, they said. But Teddy had soon got them into a good humour—all except Mr. Scripps, that is; Mr. Scripps had been tearing mad and flung off and said he was going to leave the next morning and wanted his money back. Poor Mr. Scripps—he’d looked so funny, blowing out his moustache and trying to sing while the piano went glug glug glug. People had laughed at him—you could hardly blame them—but singers are so touchy if anything goes wrong.

  Yes, Teddy had been marvellous. Turned the whole thing into a joke, got everyone laughing—nicely, not the way they’d begun to laugh at Mr. Scripps, called for some weight-lifters to help fetch in another piano out of the dance hall. The concert had gone ahead all right, just as if nothing had happened. Well, perhaps that wasn’t quite true. Some of the performers were up the spout—nervous about—what might happen next, in the middle of their turn perhaps. There was the girl who tried to play a bit of classical music on a clarinet: well, high-brow music was pretty awful, but it certainly couldn’t have been meant to sound like that: she’d said there
was something wrong with the reed, after she’d broken down, and everyone had been very sympathetic. And then, you couldn’t help being a bit put off by the way the Wonderland staff kept coming and going and whispering together. Captain Wise had asked if the visitors would mind having their chalets searched, and they’d taken a vote and everyone agreed: they had to agree, of course, after complaining that the management wasn’t doing its stuff. But it was difficult for the audience to concentrate on the music when they were expecting someone to come in any moment and say that an empty tin of treacle had been found in somebody’s chalet. You couldn’t be quite sure it wouldn’t turn up in your own, for that matter.

  Still, all things considered, the concert didn’t go off too badly. And Teddy was certainly marvellous the way he’d handled them.

  Teddy’s a nice boy, too. Handsome as they come. And you know where you are with him. Quite different from Paul Pry, who talks a different language and always seems to be trying to get at you. Paul has nice hands, though. He’d not be bad-looking if he didn’t scowl so much. He’s interesting, too, in a way Teddy isn’t. Of course, Teddy has to mind his p’s and q’s, being games organiser here; he mustn’t show more interest in one girl than in another; it’s like being an officer on a ship. I wonder is Paul interested in me. He seems to go about with that secretary creature a lot. He’ll need someone to look after him, if that girl gets on the war-path. She’d only be leading him on, too: Captain Wise is what she’s really after, I’ll bet a dollar: look at his Lagonda and his clothes and everything—well, if I was a gold-digger like Esmeralda Jones, I’d look that way myself. Still, no reason why I should let her get the claws into Paul. He’s so helpless. The bookish type. Books don’t teach you how to deal with vamps like the Jones. Funny my dreaming about them. Funny if Paul and Teddy really did have a fight. Poor Paul’d certainly get beaten up. Fancy fighting in a top hat, like he did in my dream! It had a ticket in it. The Mad Hatter’s hat. Well, of course, it was nonsense. It was just a dream. Snap out of it, Sally. Forget it.