‘Stay where you are,’ said Harriet. ‘I’ll go and see.’
Nobody, naturally, stayed where she was. Everybody came helpfully and angrily downstairs.
‘It’s the Poltergeist,’ said somebody.
‘Let’s catch her this time,’ said somebody else.
‘Perhaps it’s only blown,’ suggested a timid voice out of the darkness.
‘Blown be blowed!’ exclaimed a louder voice, scornfully. ‘How often does a main fuse blow?’ Then, in an agitated whisper, ‘Hellup, it’s the Chilperic. Sorry I spoke.’
‘Is that you, Miss Chilperic?’ said Harriet, glad to round up one member of the Senior Common Room. ‘Have you met Miss Barton anywhere?’
‘No, I’ve only just got out of bed.’
‘Miss Barton isn’t there,’ said a voice from the hall below, and then another voice chimed in:
‘Somebody’s pulled out the main fuse and taken it away!’
And then, in a shrill cry from someone at the end of the lower corridor: ‘There she goes! Look! running across the quad!’
Harriet was carried down the stairs with a rush of twenty or thirty students into the midst of those already milling in the hall. There was a cram in the doorway. She lost Miss Chilperic and was left behind in the struggle. Then, as she thrust her way through on to the terrace, she saw under the dim sky a string of runners stretched across the quad. Voices were calling shrilly. Then, as the first half-dozen or so of the pursuers were outlined against the blazing lower windows of Burleigh, those lights too were blacked out.
She ran, desperately – not to Burleigh, where the uproar was repeating itself, but to Queen Elizabeth, which, she judged, would be the next point of attack. The side-doors would, she knew, be locked. She dashed past the hall stair and through to the portico, where she flung herself upon the main door. That was locked also. She stepped back and shouted through the nearest window: ‘Look out! There’s somebody in here playing tricks. I’m coming in.’ A student put out a tousled head. Other heads appeared. ‘Let me get past,’ said Harriet, flinging the sash up, and hauling herself up over the sill. ‘They’re putting out all the lights in College. Where’s your fuse-box?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ said the student, as Harriet plunged across the room.
‘Of course you wouldn’t!’ said Harriet, unreasonably, She flung the door open and burst out – into Stygian blackness. By this time the hue-and-cry had reached Queen Elizabeth, Somebody found the front door and unlocked it, and the tumult increased, those within surging out and those outside surging in. A voice said: ‘Somebody came through my room and went out of the window, just after the lights went out.’ Torches appeared. Here and there a face – mostly unfamiliar – was momentarily lit up. Then the lights in the New Quad began to go out also, beginning on the South side. Everybody was running aimlessly. Harriet, dashing along the plinth, cannoned full tilt into somebody and flashed the torch in her face. It was the Dean.
‘Thank God!’ said Harriet. ‘Here’s somebody in the right place.’ She held on to her.
‘What’s happening?’ said the Dean.
‘Stand still,’ said Harriet: ‘I’ll have an alibi for you if I die for it.’ As she spoke, the lights on the North-East went out. ‘You’re all right,’ said Harriet. ‘Now then! make for the West Staircase and we’ll catch her.’
The same idea seemed to have occurred to a number of other people, for the entrance to the West staircase was blocked with a crowd of students, while a crowd of scouts, released by Carrie from their own Wing, added to the congestion. Harriet and the Dean forced a pathway through them, and found Miss Lydgate standing bewildered, and clasping her proof-sheets to her bosom, being determined that this time nothing should happen to them. They scooped her up with them – ‘like playing “Staggie” ’ thought Harriet – and made their way to the fuse-boxes under the stairs. There they found Padgett, grimly on guard, with his trousers hastily pulled on over his pyjamas and a rolling-pin in his hand.
‘They don’t get this,’ said Padgett. ‘You leave it to me, madam Dean, miss. Just turning into my bed, I was, all the late-leave ladies being in. My wife’s telephoning across to Jackson to fetch over some new fuses. Have you seen the boxes, miss? Wrenched open with a chisel, they was, or summat of that. A nice thing to happen. But they won’t get this.’
Nor did ‘they.’ In the West side of the New Quad, the Warden’s House, the Infirmary, and the Scouts’ Wing entrenched behind its relocked grille, the lights burned on steadily. But when Jackson arrived with the new fuses, every darkened building showed its trail of damage. While Padgett had sat by the mouse-hole, waiting for the mouse that did not come, the Poltergeist had passed through the college, breaking ink-bottles, flinging papers into the fire, smashing lamps and crockery and throwing books through the window-panes. In the Hall, where the main fuse had also been taken, the silver cups on the High Table had been hurled at the portraits, breaking the glass, and the plaster bust of a Victorian benefactor pitched down the stone stair, to end in a fragmentary trail of detached side-whiskers and disintegrated features.
‘Well!’ said the Dean, surveying the wreckage. ‘That’s one thing to be grateful for. We’ve seen the last of the Reverend Melchisedek Entwistle, But, oh, lord!’
10
Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness,
Some say thy grace is youth and gentle sport;
Both grace and faults are loved of more and less;
Thou makst faults graces that to thee resort.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
It would seem, at first sight, as though, in an episode witnessed by so many people and lasting altogether about an hour (counting, that is, from the first alarm in Tudor to the refitting of the final fuse) it should have been easy to find alibis for all the innocent. In practice, it was not so at all, chiefly owing to the stubborn refusal of human beings to stay where they are put. It was the very multiplicity of witnesses that made the difficulty; for it seemed likely that the culprit had mixed with the crowd over and over again in the dark. Some alibis were established for certain: Harriet and the Dean had been standing together when the lights were extinguished on the Northeast angle of the New Quad; the Warden had not left her own house till after the uproar had started, as her household staff could attest; the two porters were vouched for by their respective wives, and had, in fact, never been suspected, since on various earlier occasions disturbances had occurred while they were at their posts; the Infirmarian and the Infirmary maid had also been together the whole time. Miss Hudson, the student who had been considered a ‘possible,’ had been at a coffee-party when the trouble began, and was clear; Miss Lydgate also, to Harriet’s great relief, had been in Queen Elizabeth,, enjoying the hospitality of a party of Third Years; she had just risen to say good night, remarking that it was past her usual time, when the lights had gone out. She had then been caught up in the throng and, as soon as she could free herself, had run hastily up to her own room to rescue her proofs.
Other members of the S.C.R. were less fortunately placed. The case of Miss Barton was exciting and mysterious. According to her own account, she had been sitting working when the fuse was pulled out in Tudor. After trying the wall-switch, she had looked out of the window, seen the figure hastening across the quad, and gone immediately in pursuit. The figure had dodged her round Burleigh twice, and had then suddenly come upon her from behind, flung her against the wall ‘with extraordinary strength’ and knocked her torch from her hand. Before she could recover herself, the evil-doer had extinguished the Burleigh lights and gone again. Miss Barton could give no description of this person, except that it wore ‘something dark’ and ran very fast. She had not seen its face. The only proof of this story was that Miss Barton certainly had received a heavy bruise on the side of the face where, so she said, she had been flung against an angle of the building. She had remained where she lay for a few minutes after receiving the blow; by that time the excitement had spread to the New Quad. Here she ha
d certainly been seen for a few seconds together by a pair of students. She had then run to look for the Dean, found her room empty, run out again and joined Harriet and the rest in the West Staircase.
Miss Chilperic’s story was equally difficult of proof. When the cry of ‘There she goes!’ had been raised at Tudor, she had been among the first to run out, but, having no torch, and being too much excited to notice where she was going, she had tripped and fallen down the steps of the terrace, twisting her foot slightly. This had made her late in arriving on the scene. She had come up with the crowd at Queen Elizabeth, been carried in with it through the portico and run straight into the New Quadrangle Buildings. She had thought she heard footsteps scurrying along to her right, and had followed them, when the lights had gone out and, not knowing the building at all well, she had wandered about in some confusion, till at last she found the way out into the quad. Nobody seemed able to remember seeing Miss Chilperic at all after she left Tudor; she was that kind of person.
The Treasurer had been sitting up at work on the term’s accounts. The lights in her building had been the last to go out, and her windows looked outward upon the road and not upon the quad, so that she had known nothing about the affair till a late stage in the proceedings. When the darkness fell on her she went (so she said) to the Bursar’s set opposite, electrical replacements being in the Bursar’s department. The Bursar was not in her bedroom or office; but as Miss Allison came out from looking for her, she emerged from the place where the fuse-boxes were, to announce the disappearance of the main fuse. Treasurer and Bursar had then joined the crowd in the quadrangle.
The account given by Miss Pyke of her movements seemed to be the most incredible of all. She lived above the Treasurer and had been working at an article for a learned Society’s transactions. When her lights had gone out, she had said, ‘Bother!’, taken a pair of candles from a stock which she kept for such emergencies, and gone quietly on working.
Miss Burrows asserted that she had been having a bath when the Burleigh Building Lights failed, and, by an extraordinary coincidence, had found, on getting hastily out of it, that she had left her towel in her bedroom. She did not possess a self-contained set with a private bathroom and so was obliged to grope, with her dressing-gown clutched about her dripping body, along the passage to her bedroom, and there dry and dress herself in the dark. This had taken a surprisingly long time and, when she came up with the main party, most of the fun was over. No proof, except the undoubted presence of soapy water in a bathroom on her floor.
Miss Shaw’s set was over the Bursar’s, and her bedroom looked out on St. Cross Road. She had gone to bed and to sleep, being very tired, and knew nothing about it till it was all over. The same story was told by Mrs. Goodwin, who had returned to College only that day, rather exhausted by sick-nursing. As for Miss Hillyard and Miss de Vine, living above Miss Lydgate; their lights had never gone out at all, and, their windows facing on the road, they had never known that anything was wrong, putting down a vague noise in the quad to the natural cussedness of undergraduates.
It had only been after Padgett had sat for about five minutes in vain at the mouse-hole, that Harriet had done what she should have done earlier, and attempted to make a count of the Senior Common Room. She had then found them all in the places where, by their subsequent accounts of themselves, they should have been. But to collect them all into one lighted room and keep them there was not so easy. She established Miss Lydgate in her own room and went to look for the rest, asking them to go straight down to Miss Lydgate’s room and stay there. The Warden, meanwhile, had arrived and was addressing the students, imploring them also to stay where they were and keep quiet. Unfortunately, just as it began to seem possible to make sure of everybody’s whereabouts, some inquisitive person, who had broken away from the rest and gone roaming through the Old Quad, arrived, breathless, to announce the tale of damage in the Hall. Instantly, pandemonium broke loose again. Dons who were trotting like lambs into the sheep-fold suddenly lost their heads and raced with the students into the darkness. Miss Burrows screamed ‘The Library!’ and tore away, and the Bursar, with an anguished cry for the College property, dashed after her. The Dean called, ‘Stop them!’ and Miss Pyke and Miss Hillyard, taking the command to themselves, rushed out and disappeared. In the resulting confusion, everybody got lost twenty times over; and by the time the fuses were replaced and the community at last gathered and numbered, the damage had all been done.
It is surprising how much can be done in a very few minutes. Harriet calculated that the Hall had probably been wrecked first of all, being in a detached wing, where noise was not likely to attract much attention; all that was done there could have been done in a couple of minutes. From the extinguishing of the first lights in Tudor to that of the last lights in the New Quad, rather less than ten, minutes had elapsed. The third, and longest part of the business – the wrecking of the rooms in the darkened buildings, had taken anything from a quarter to half an hour.
The Warden addressed the College after Chapel, again enjoining discretion, begging the culprit to come forward, and promising that all possible measure should be taken to identify her in case she did not confess.
‘I have no intention,’ said Dr. Baring, ‘of inflicting any restriction or punishment upon the college in general for the act of one irresponsible person. I will ask any one who has any suggestion to make or any evidence to offer with regard to the identity of this foolish practical joker to come privately, either to the Dean or myself, and make the communication in strict confidence.’
She added a few words about the solidarity of the College and departed with a grave face, her gown floating behind her.
The glaziers were already at work restoring damaged window-panes. In the Hall, the Bursar was affixing neat cards in the places of portraits whose glass had been broken: ‘Portrait of Miss Matheson: Warden 1899–1912. Removed for cleaning.’ Broken crockery was being swept from the grass of the Old Quad. The College was engaged in presenting a serene face to the world.
It did not improve anybody’s temper to discover a printed message, consisting of ‘HA! HA!’ and a vulgar epithet, pasted across the mirror in the Senior Common Room, shortly before lunch. The Common Room had been empty from 9 o’clock onwards, so far as was known. The Common Room maid, going in at lunch-time with the coffee-cups, had been the first to see the notice; and it had by then dried hard. The Bursar, who had missed her pot of Gloy after the night’s excitement, found it placed neatly in the centre of the S.C.R. mantelpiece.
The feeling in the Senior Common Room after this episode underwent a subtle alteration. Tongues were sharpened; the veneer of detachment began to wear thin; the uneasiness of suspicion began to make itself felt; only Miss Lydgate and the Dean, being proved innocent, remained unmoved.
‘Your bad luck seems to have repeated itself, Miss Barton,’ observed Miss Pyke, acidly, ‘Both in the Library affair and in this last outbreak, you seem to have been first on the spot and yet unhappily prevented from securing the culprit.’
‘Yes,’ said Miss Barton. ‘It’s very unfortunate. If next time my gown gets taken as well, the College sleuth will begin to smell a rat.’
‘Very trying for you, Mrs. Goodwin,’ said Miss Hillyard, ‘to come back to all this upset, just when you needed a rest. I trust your little boy is better. It is particularly tiresome, because all the time you were away we had no disturbance at all.’
‘It’s most annoying,’ said Mrs. Goodwin. ‘The poor creature who does these things must be quite demented. Of course these disorders do tend to occur in celibate, or chiefly celibate communities. It is a kind of compensation, I suppose, for the lack of other excitements.’
‘The great mistake,’ said Miss Burrows, ‘was, of course, our not keeping together. Naturally I wanted to see if any damage had been done in the Library – but why so many people should have come pelting after me—’
‘The Hall was my concern,’ said the Bursar.
&n
bsp; ‘Oh! you did get to the Hall? I completely lost sight of you in the quad.’
‘That,’ said Miss Hillyard, ‘was exactly the catastrophe I was trying to avoid when I pursued you. I called loudly to you to stop. You must have heard me.’
‘There was too much noise to hear anything,’ said Miss Stevens.
‘I came to Miss Lydgate’s room,’ said Miss Shaw, ‘the moment I could get dressed, understanding that everybody was to be there. But there was really nobody. I thought I must have misunderstood, so I tried to find Miss Vane, but she seemed to have gone off into the Ewigkeit.’
‘It must have taken you a remarkably long time to dress,’ said Miss Burrows. ‘Anybody could run three times round College in the time it takes you to pull your stockings on.’
‘Somebody,’ said Miss Shaw, ‘apparently did.’
‘They’re beginning to get fractious,’ said Harriet to the Dean.
‘What can you expect? The silly cuckoos! If they’d only sat tight on their little behinds last night, we could have cleared the whole business up. It’s not your fault. You couldn’t be everywhere at once. How we can expect discipline from the students, when a whole bunch of middle-aged seniors behave like a flock of hens in a crisis, I can’t think. Who’s that out there, conducting that strident conversation with a top window? Oh! I think it’s Baker’s young man. Well, discipline must be observed, I suppose. Give me the house telephone, would you? Thanks. I don’t see how we’re to prevent this last outbreak from getting – Oh! Martha! The Dean’s compliments, if you please, to Miss Baker, and will she kindly bear in mind the rule about morning visitors – And the students are getting rather annoyed about the destruction of their property. I think they’re actually getting worked up to calling a J.C.R. meeting, and it’s very unfair on them, poor lambs, to let them go on suspecting one another, but what can we do about it? Thank God, it’s the last week of term! I suppose we’re not making a ghastly mistake? It must be one of us, and not a student or a scout.’
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