Will You Surrender?

by Joyce Dingwell

  WILL YOU SURRENDER? by JOYCE DINGWELL

  Geraldine was the Professor's daughter. She looked forward to being the Headmaster's daughter. So when Damien Manning got the appointment that she felt was her father's due, her reception of him was less than friendly. The setting of this lively story is a boys' school in Australia, perched on a cliff above the blue Pacific.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Originally published by Mills & Boon Limited,50 Grafton Way, Fitzroy Square, London, England.

  Harlequin edition published February, 1968

  All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the Author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the Author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

  The Harlequin trade mark, consisting of the word HARLEQUIN® and the portrayal of a Harlequin, is registered in the United States Patent Office and in the Canada Trade Marks Office.

  Copyright, 1968, by Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

  CHAPTER I

  THE polished brass plate on the wrought-iron gate said "The Galdang Academy for Boys" but because of its position on the jutting bluff the group of buildings was often referred to as "The College by the Sea".

  It was a popular school with a long waiting list, one of those traditional institutions where eager fathers make provisional enrolments for their sons even before their arrival is signalled.

  It was old; that is, old for Australia. You could tell that from the early colonial trend of the architecture of the master building which was the original house "Galdang". It was said that the first owner had chosen this name because galdang was aboriginal for noise, and here on the headland there was an abundance of that commodity, the crash of the surf, the sough of the sea winds, the ceaseless screech of tern.

  Now, years after, one saw immediately that the place had been aptly dubbed, for where boys are there is always noise, and there were boys at Galdang, five hundred of them, and if the gulls ever weakened or the seas and sea winds diminished, their young voices could be depended upon to uphold the Galdang name.

  Geraldine, who had lived all her life at the college by the sea, had come to take such noises for granted.

  It was right that Archimedes' Principle recited by forty young voices should rival the sound of the waves on the rocks at the foot of the cliff. It was right that the Lays of Rome and Wordsworth's Daffodils should pit their strength against the protesting gulls. At recess, and after lessons and before tea, it was right that the surf and the wind and the tern should be hopelessly outclassed by five hundred young souls suddenly released from torture. For torture, thought Gerry, it must be, however kind and interesting the master. No male child, even a bookish one, could have looked down on that blue explosion of Pacific Ocean and not known sea fever.

  To her own father, Professor Prosset, housemaster of the Senior or Cliff House, could be laid much of the blame.

  Often Gerry had heard him interrupting his mathematics classes to recite Hovey's Sea Gypsy. Algebra, geometry, trig, the mysteries of quadratic equations would be edged away every time a ship passed far out at sea.

  "Taking frozen meat, wheat, wool and apples," his resonant voice would call. And then, to thrill the dreamers, "Bringing onyx and turtle fins, cinnamon and joss sticks."

  There would be silence, the rapt silence of boys at a helm instead of a desk, then with a "Back to work, class" the Professor would bring the facts of a right-angled triangle into their midst again and the ship would creep over the horizon's lilac edge.

  Gerry often chided her father for tantalizing his pupils. "It's not fair, darling. How can you expect them to return to mathematics after that?"

  "How can you expect them to do mathematics without that?"

  "Other schools do."

  "Yes," admitted the Professor, but his eyes behind their glasses wondered how they did it—and Gerry wondered with him She, too, was absorbed with the sea.

  Before they had occupied the Cliff House, the fields had absorbed her.

  The Meadow House, which was the junior headquarters, had been the Prossets' first home, and here, in typical Professor fashion, elementary arithmetic had been held up every now and then by a discussion of the crops the gardener was planting, an observation of a bird, the discovery that spring was burgeoning the fruit trees with small blunt buds.

  Taken all in all, it had been a very satisfactory life, thought Gerry, ten years looking on a meadow, nine years looking on the sea, and now what?

  Trying not to hug herself in thrilling anticipation, she took out the Professor's gown and wished she was allowed to darn as well as shake and brush it.

  She was well aware that mending or cleaning was never performed on such honoured robes of office, but surely when one was headmaster, she thought. . . .

  And today, within the next few hours, that was what was going to happen to Professor Prosset.

  She, Geraldine Prosset, would be the daughter of the Principal of the Galdang Academy for Boys.

  In his bedroom Professor Prosset prepared in his usual thoughtful fashion for the board meeting that lay ahead.

  Arnold Prosset had never coveted the headmastership. Helen, his wife, so long as she had lived, had never cast jealous eyes on the master building on the extreme summit of the cliff.

  But Geraldine had, and did.

  As a little girl in the Meadow House, as a bigger girl in the Cliff House, she had known only one burning ambition —to reside in Galdang proper, the house, as she had always thought of it, with the saint on the door.

  Actually, he was a very ancient saint, so ancient no one knew anything about him, and he looked down, arms outstretched in benediction, on all who passed beneath.

  It had not mattered to Geraldine that years of elements had changed the saint's handsome profile to a comical snub, that a daring young soul had climbed up one night and altered the straight, sensitive mouth to a toothless grin, the door—and the house—still cast enchantment on a small girl, and years later the same girl, now on tiptoe to womanhood, looked up with the same burning eyes.

  It was just as well that Arnold and Helen Prosset had been contented with their lot, for Edmund Ferguson, Prosset's immediate senior, had remained on as Galdang's headmaster right up to his retirement. That had been last week. Today's board meeting was to say thank you and goodbye to Mr. Ferguson, and, since the headmastership went by seniority, to bid welcome to Professor Prosset.

  Already Gerry had packed most of their things in preparation for the move higher up the bluff.

  There were materials, too, in the closet, ready to be fashioned into curtains for the new windows. The future young mistress had even contemplated making them up, but she had remembered in time that Galdang's windows would be wider than those of the Cliff House, longer than those of the junior home, so it would be wiser, if frustrating, to wait.

  As she stood now, the Professor's rusty black gown in

  her hand, she pictured the views through those master windows, the outlook to the east, the aspect to the west.

  All that she had loved in the Meadow House and the Cliff House would be there, as well as the panorama that was Galdang's alone, for Galdang proper stood on the very highest spot and it was a two-storied house.

  "The windows will be crammed with fields on one side, sea on the other," she thought with a stab of longing, "the rooms will be filled with the murmurs of both."

  The prospect of playing hostess to visiting parents, mother to the boarders, mistress to matron, housekeeper and cook, did not dismay her.

  All her life she had been in this environment. For years she had had prefects over for Saturday tea
, small homesick boys for cheer-up sessions of buns and lemonade, a few forbidden sweets and a lot of unforbidden love.

  I am ready for it, she thought with confidence. I am capable. I know I can perform my part.

  The Professor was emerging from his bedroom at last. As usual his tie was crooked and he had forgotten a clean handkerchief.

  Gerry straightened the tie and produced a handkerchief, then she helped her father almost reverently into the gown. The teachers always attended the board meetings in their gowns.

  She flicked here, adjusted there, then stepped back to admire.

  "So this is it, Dad," she said in homage. "Tell me, darling, how does it feel?"

  Arnold Prosset did not answer at once. Only someone caught up in windows crammed with fields and sea, rooms filled with their murmurs, would not have noticed his hesitancy. Gerry did not notice it. She was bemused.

  "I feel no different," he admitted at length. Then, anxiously, "Geraldine—"

  "Yes, Dad?"

  Again the little pause still unnoticed by his daughter. "What is the time?" evaded Prosset instead.

  "Time for the headmaster to leave if he wants to make a dignified entry. Off you go, darling. I'll be thinking of you—sir."

  Once more he tried. "Gerry

  She did not hear him. She was draping the windows now

  —the russet and gold weave for the field aspect, the clear-eyed blue with the water motifs for the side to the sea.

  She pushed him out of the door and blew him a kiss. She watched him walk slowly up to the assembly room where the board meetings were always held.

  If he walked slower than usual she only put it down to his new dignity.

  Dear, dear Professor, climbing the last rung of the ladder of his career. He should have had this years ago—would have only for the misfortune of Mr. Ferguson being slightly senior and just as immovable from the school as the Prossets had been.

  Oh, well, there were many terms still in front of him before he retired, and achievement is always sweeter when it is earned, not given.

  "Bless you," she said to the receding figure, "you've deserved it, Dad."

  With a smile she came back into the room, crossed to the closet and took out the new curtain material.

  CHAPTER II

  THE curtains favoured by the wife of the departing principal had been sadly uninspired, but then Mrs. Ferguson herself was uninspired. She had never liked the big stone house. She called it clumsy, top-heavy. She had looked forward to her husband's retirement and a nice snug flat in a convenient Sydney suburb. Gerry hoped she had found what she wanted. Fergie, if dull, was kind. She had been a tower of strength when Mother died.

  Taking out the parcels of materials, Gerry paused a moment, remembering that day, nine years ago now.

  They had just moved from the Meadow to the Cliff House. Dad had been promoted from the ragamuffins to the rascals, or, as the Professor more properly put it, from the lads to the young men.

  Mother had not been so keen on the move. Perhaps she

  was not well even then, perhaps she was sad to leave the home where she had come as a bride, the roof tree in which her love had blossomed when Geraldine arrived.

  Gerry, of course, could not have told. Gerry does not notice such things. She only remembered that she had been wildly excited, for although the fields from the windows of the Meadow House had offered many excitements they were nothing to the excitements that the Cliff House windows promised.

  An ocean as bright as polished enamel, gorse on the bluff edge giving up a faint peachy smell, everywhere gulls, dipping, soaring, swerving, tracing lovely patterns in the air.

  She had planned to take the little lane that ran seawards, to scramble over the rocks and find a mermaid perhaps, to explore a cave.

  But it had not turned out like that—not at once, she recalled.

  She remembered Dad telling her quietly, gently, that Mother had gone away, that she was not coming back any more. Then his face had crumpled and Mrs. Ferguson had taken over. The Fergusons had no children of their own, and when later it was suggested that Geraldine be sent to Sydney to boarding-school they had scorned the idea.

  "There's a school right here, Arnold Prosset," said the principal's wife. "What else does she want?"

  "A little girl among five hundred boys?"

  "Five thousand boys if you like. I tell you, Professor, she's not going, and that's that."

  So Gerry had remained, living in the Cliff House with Dad, the house matron, Clara the housekeeper, Millicent the maid, and the senior young men, watched over from Galdang by a motherly Mrs. F.

  At a desk to herself in one of the schoolrooms she had completed her early lessons along with thirty-nine small boys. When the boys had proceeded to higher mathematics and languages, she had proceeded, too.

  They liked her, and she liked them. She had almost liked the third one to propose to her after he had finished his education enough to say yes.

  If it had meant remaining at Galdang, she even believed she would have said yes to Toby Ordwell. But the school by the sea had absorbed her. Father sometimes said it was

  an obsession. Perhaps it was, and Gerry gave an impish grin. She knew she had hated every minute of her absence when the Professor had insisted that at least she follow up her matriculation with a primary teaching course.

  That period in Sydney had been torture, the same torture, she had often thought, as boys in a schoolroom felt looking out at the sea.

  However, the Professor had been adamant, and only when she had achieved her teaching certificate did he allow her to come home.

  At once she had taken up the reins again. "Born for it," Mrs. Ferguson had said ruefully, "just what I was not. I do believe, you misguided child, that you like boys."

  She did like them, more than that, she loved them, but most of all she loved Galdang—her "obsession" as the Professor said.

  She opened the parcels of materials now, felt their texture, feasted on their colours—and knew that she must go up.

  "I'll take the tape-measure with me. I can get through the laundry window. No one will know because the boys are still on vac."

  Excited, she replaced the bundles in the closet, coming back to haul out her old blue jeans and plaid shirt.

  "I'll go by the mountain goat track," she planned—the Professor, because of its steepness, had named it that—"I did it at fifteen, so now I should be four years better."

  Giggling, she climbed into the pants and shirt, thrust her feet into a pair of rather battered rubbers, slicked a comb through her short, straight, acorn-brown hair.

  Then she left the Cliff House, and, veering sharply to the right, began ascending. The track was sandy at first and shaded with dipping casuarinas, but soon only harsh gorse could exist on the precipitous path, and Gerry had to dig her feet firmly into crannies, her eyes searching ahead as she did so for new toe-holds.

  The gulls were screeching around her. I love them, she thought happily. They are my gulls. The same as Galdang is mine . . . the same as the master house.

  She was almost on top now. She was recalling how as a small girl Galdang had always seemed to be a fort to be stormed, a citadel to be conquered for one's own.

  She remembered racing around it chanting the old verse:

  "Will you surrender, will you surrender The town of Barbary?"

  In some way the nursery-rhyme town and the big stone house had become one in her eager imaginative mind.

  Well, she thought proudly now, Barbary was conquered at last. By this time the Professor must have been told officially of his appointment, had had his hand shaken, been given his welcome.

  Galdang had surrendered. It was her house. Gerry reached the crest and with a triumphant smile turned her back on the sea.

  Old Saxby, the gardener, had taken advantage of the school vacation to give the grounds some extra uninterrupted attention—or had it been, and Gerry almost hugged herself in satisfaction, an extra brush-up for the new mast
er and mistress?

  "Will you surrender, will you surrender?" she repeated under her breath, and all at once the old magic was taking possession of her, and once more she was an uninhibited ten.

  Racing impulsively forward, secure in the knowledge that it was vac and there was no one to watch, she did what she used to do when she was a small girl. She bent as far across the single bar fence as she could, then rotated slowly over and over like a wheel, achieving, as well as the exhilarating giddy sensation, a new upside-down view of the big house.

  She stopped rotating and, still under the spell, climbed on the rail and performed a parallel bar act for a few spans. This demanded too much concentration, however. She hopped down again, selected some small lucky stones and tried her skill at hitting the bare flagpole at the left of the building.

  The years had lost her once male-equal aim. The second pebble missed by yards and fell on the roof, instead, with a resounding smack. Damien Manning, going through a folio of reports in the library directly beneath it, leapt violently to his feet and swore aloud.

  He went to the window and peered angrily through the shutters. A young boy was skylarking by the cliff fence. The man's frown deepened to a scowl.

  He had been given to understand that all the boarders

  had gone home, that no boy remained at the college, but that, he perceived now, was a mistake. Undoubtedly, the lad believed that since the Fergusons had moved the house was empty, that there was no one to see his misdeeds. Damien had sympathy with pupils left at school during vacation—he had known the boredom it entails himself—but his sympathy did not extend to permitting vandalism. He frowned, too, over the incorrect dress of the boy. Perhaps it was asking too much to demand uniform grey shirt and college tie during holidays, but surely the young ruffian could have chosen something more apt.

  Another stone . . . another miss. . . . That settles it, said Manning. The impudent young wretch is due for a quick and painful check.