For the Sake of the School (18 page)

Susan grinned comprehension.

"Standard V Historical Reader. Not me!" she chuckled. "I always thought the woman was a silly to trust a man to turn the cakes."

"Well, mind you show up better. You might as well put the milk-can in the stream to keep cool. We don't want it curdled, and I'm certain there's thunder about."

Addie and Gertie were sure they were not absent long. They just stood and watched a few messages being sent, then ran back promptly to their duties.

Susannah Maude was in the very act of trying to lift the big camp-kettle from its trivet.

"Hold hard there!" screamed Addie, running to the rescue. "You can't move that alone. Susan! Stop!" It was too late, however. The small busybody had managed to stir the kettle, but, her youthful arms being quite unequal to sustaining its weight, she let it drop, retreating with a wild Indian yell of alarm. The stream of boiling water fortunately escaped her, but nearly put out the fire. When the steam and dust had subsided, the rueful scouts picked up the empty kettle gingerly, as it was hot.

"We shall have to build up the fire again," lamented Gertrude. "Oh, Addie, the cakes!"

She might well exclaim. In a row among the ashes were the soaked, dust-covered remains of the precious currant-buns.

"I took 'em out of the oven because they were done," explained Susan hastily, justifying herself. "I thought you shouldn't blame me for letting 'em burn, anyhow; and I put 'em down there on some dock-leaves to keep hot. I couldn't tell the kettle would fall on 'em."

"They're done for," sighed Addie. "There isn't one fit to eat. Help us to fill the kettle again as soon as you can, and fetch some more sticks and gorse, you black-eyed Susan!"

"Where's the milk-can?" asked Gertrude uneasily.

"I put it in the stream as you told me," replied the orphan rather sulkily, indicating with a nod the location.

Decidedly anxious as to its safety, the girls ran to the water-side. They always put the can in a particular little sheltered corner fenced in by a few stones. Susannah had helped them to place it there many times, and had even named the spot "the dairy". They looked in vain. The milk was certainly not there now.

"What in the name of thunder have you done with the can, you wretched imp?" shouted Addie, thoroughly angry.

"You said it ought to keep very cool, so I threw it into the deep pool. 'Tain't my fault," retorted Susannah, who had a temper as well as her benefactresses.

"I've half a mind to throw you after it!" raged Gertie, her fingers twitching to shake the luckless orphan.

Perhaps Susannah's experienced eye gauged the extent of her wrath, and decided that for once she had gone too far. She did not wait to proffer any more explanations, but turned and fled back towards the house, resuming her neglected pan-scouring in the scullery with a zeal that astonished the cook.

Addie and Gertie replenished the camp-fire and refilled the kettle; but the cakes were hopeless, and the milk was beyond recall. Doris Deane, the champion swimmer of the school, dived for the can next morning and brought it up empty; the lid was never recovered, probably having been washed into a hole.

The Guild sat down that afternoon rather disconsolately to milkless tea. Addie had begged a small jugful from the kitchen, enough for their guests, the mistresses, but it was impossible to replace the big two-gallon can at a moment's notice.

"I begin to wish the school had never supported an orphan at the 'Alexandra Home for Destitute Children'," sighed Gertie, eating plain bread and butter, and thinking regretfully of her spoilt cakes. "I vote next term we ask to give up collecting for it, and keep a monkey at the Zoo instead. We could send it nuts and biscuits at Christmas."

"And currant-buns?" giggled Beth Broadway.

"You are about the most unfeeling wretch I ever came across!" snapped Gertrude.

A Point of Honour

"Lizzie," announced Ulyth, sitting down on a stump in the glade, and speaking slowly and emphatically, "The Woodlands isn't what it used to be."

"So Stephanie was saying the other day," agreed Lizzie, taking a seat on the stump by the side of her friend. "She thinks it's a different place altogether."

"It is; though not exactly from Stephie's point of view. I don't care the least scrap that there are no Vernons or Courtenays or Derringtons here now. Stephie can lament them if she likes. I never knew them, so I can't regret them. There's one thing I can't help noticing, though--the tone has been going down."

"Do you think it has?" replied Lizzie thoughtfully. "Merle and Alice and Mary are rather silly, certainly, but there's not much harm in them."

"I don't mean our form; it's the juniors. I've noticed it continually lately."

"Now you come to speak of it, so have I. I don't quite know what it is, but there's a something."

"There's a very decided something. It's come on quite lately, but it's there. They're not behaving nicely at all. They've slacked all round, and do nothing but snigger among themselves over jokes they won't tell."

"They're welcome to their own jokes as far as I'm concerned, the young idiots!"

"Yes, if it's only just fun; but I'm afraid it's something more than that--something they're ashamed of and really want to hide. I've seen such shuffling and queer business going on when any of the monitresses came in sight."

"Have you said anything to Catherine or Helen?"

"No, and I don't want to. It's very unfortunate, but they've really got no tact. Catherine's so high-handed, and Helen's nearly as bad. They snap the girls up for the least trifle. The result is the juniors have got it into their tiresome young heads that monitresses are a species of teacher. They weren't intended to be that at all. A monitress is just one of ourselves, only with authority that we all allow. She ought to be jolly with everybody."

"Um! You can hardly call Catherine jolly with the kids."

"That's just it. They resent it; they've gone their own way lately, and it's been decidedly downhill. I'm persuaded they're playing some deep and surreptitious game at present. I wish I knew what it was."

"Can't Rona tell you?"

"I wouldn't pump Rona for the world. It's most frightfully difficult for her, a junior, to be room-mate with a senior. Her form always suspect her of giving them away to the Upper School. Rona's had a hard enough struggle to get any footing at all at The Woodlands, and I don't want to make it any harder for her. If she once gets the reputation of 'tell-tale' she's done for. Since Stephanie made that fuss about juniors coming into senior rooms I mayn't ask her into V B; so if she's ostracized by her own form too she'll be neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. No; however I find out it mustn't be through Rona."

"Yes, I quite see your point. Now you speak of it, I believe those juniors are up to something. There's a prodigious amount of whispering and sniggering among them. 'What's the joke?' I said to Tootie Phillips yesterday, and she flared out in the most truculent manner: 'That's our own business, thank you!'"

"Tootie has been making herself most objectionable lately. She wants sitting upon."

"Catherine will do that, never fear."

"No doubt, but it doesn't bring us any nearer finding out what those juniors are after."

"They vanish mysteriously after tea sometimes. I vote we watch them, and next time it happens we'll stalk them."

"Right-O! But not a word to anybody else, or it might get about and put them on their guard."

"Trust me! I wouldn't even flicker an eyelid."

Now that Ulyth and Lizzie had compared notes on the subject of the juniors, they became more convinced than ever of the fact that something surreptitious was going on. Nods, hints, words which apparently bore a hidden meaning, nudges, and signs were the order of the day. All friendly advances on the part of seniors were repelled, the younger girls keeping strictly to themselves. This was the more marked as there had never been any very great division at The Woodlands between Upper and Lower School, the whole of the little community sharing in most of the general interests.

After tea there was a short interval before evening preparation began, and during the summer term this was spent, if possible, out-of-doors by everybody. One afternoon, only a few days after the conversation just recorded, the girls had filed as usual from the dining-hall, and were racing off for tennis, basket-ball, or a run by the stream. As Ulyth, down on her knees in the darkest part of the hall cupboard, groped for her mislaid tennis-shoes, two members of IV B came in for a moment to fetch balls. They were in a hurry and they evidently did not perceive her presence.

"Did you get the tip?" Irene Scott asked Ethel Jephson under her breath. "By the lower pool immediately."

"All serene! Tootie told me herself."

"Pass it on then; though I think most know."

As they ran down the passage, Ulyth, relinquishing her hunt for the missing shoes, rose to her feet.

"There's one here who didn't know," she chuckled. "This is a most important piece of information. Immediately, by the lower pool, is it? Well, I must go and find Lizzie. What are those precious juniors up to, I wonder?"

Lizzie was taking her racket for a game of tennis, but she readily gave up her place to Merle Denham at a hint from Ulyth.

"I told you they vanished after tea," she said, as the two girls sauntered into the glen. "We'll track them this time. Don't on any account look as if you were going anywhere. Sit down here and give them a few minutes' grace, in case stragglers come up. They probably won't begin punctually. I'll time it by my watch."

When five minutes had elapsed there was not a solitary junior to be seen in the glade, and Ulyth and Lizzie, deeming themselves safe, set out in the direction of the lower pool.

This was a part of the stream at the very verge of the grounds belonging to The Woodlands; indeed, the greater portion of it lay in the land of a neighbouring farmer, and to reach its pebbly bank meant a scramble round some palings and under a projecting piece of rock.

Ulyth and Lizzie were too wary to follow the juniors by this path, but scaled the palings at another point, and under cover of a thick copse of gorse-bushes approached the pool from the side that lay in the farmer's field. By most careful scouting they found a spot on the bank where they could see and hear without being seen.

Below them, seated on the rocks by the edge of the water, were practically almost the whole of the Lower School. They cuddled close, with their arms round each other, and to judge from their repressed giggles they appeared to be enjoying themselves. Tootie Phillips, a long-legged, excitable girl of thirteen, mounted upon a boulder, was addressing them with much fervour. Ulyth and Lizzie missed the beginning of her remarks, but when they came within earshot they realized that she was in the midst of a vigorous harangue against the seniors.

"Are we to be trodden down just because we're a little younger than they are?" urged Tootie. "Why should they lord it over us, I should like to know? They were juniors themselves only a year or two ago. I tell you the worm will turn."

"It's turned pretty considerably," guffawed Cissie Newall.

"It knows which side its bread's buttered," cackled Irene Scott.

"Buttered! You mean sugared, don't you?"

At this sally the whole party broke into a shout of laughter.

"Good for you, Ciss!"

"Sugared! Ra--ther!"

"Shut up, you sillies! Someone will hear us," commanded Tootie. "I was saying before, we're not going to be sat upon, either by teachers or monitresses or seniors. We'll take our own way."

"A sugary way," chirped Ethel Jephson.

The girls hinnied again. There was evidently something underlying the joke.

"When perfectly ridiculous rules are made, that never ought to have been made," continued Tootie, "then we've a right to take the law into our own hands and do as we please."

"Our pocket money's our own," grumbled a discontented spirit from the back.

"Of course it is, and we ought to be able to do what we like with it."

"And so are our brooches, if we want to----"

"Sh--sh!"

"Shut up, stupid!"

"Well, we all know."

"No need to blare it out, if we do."

"I wasn't blaring."

"Violet Robertson, remember your oath," commanded Tootie. "If you let a word of--we know what--leak out, you're sent to Coventry for the rest of the term. Yes. Not a single one of us will speak one single word to you. Not even your own room-mates. So there!"

"Well, you needn't make such a precious fuss. I'm sure I wasn't letting out secrets," retorted Violet sulkily. "But I think there ought to be some rate of value. My brooch was a far better one than Mollie's."

"Right you are, my hearty, and I'm going to speak about it. We mustn't let ourselves be done, even by--you know who!"

"And she's sharp."

"She's getting too sharp. We must stop it, even if we have to break off for a whole week."

"No, no!"

"Oh, not that anyhow!"

"Well, look here, if you're such sillies, you deserve----"

But at this most interesting point the loud clanging of the preparation-bell put a stop to any further argument. With one accord the girls jumped up, and fled back as fast as they could run in the direction of the school. Ulyth and Lizzie, at the risk of being late for evening call-over, gave the conspirators time to get well away before they ventured to follow.

"What's the meaning of all this?" queried Lizzie, as they scouted cautiously through the glade.

"I can't imagine. They're evidently doing something they oughtn't to, the young wretches! But they're keeping it very dark."

"We shall have to watch them."

"We must indeed," sighed Ulyth. "Lizzie, I loathe eavesdropping and anything that savours of underhand work, but what are we to do? Something is going wrong among the juniors, and for the sake of the school we've got to put it right if we possibly can. It's no use asking them their sweet secret, for they wouldn't tell us; and I'm afraid setting the monitresses on the track would only make things worse. If we can find out what they're doing, then we shall know our ground. I'm a Torch-bearer and you're a Fire-maker, and we must appeal to them to keep their Camp-fire vows. But we can't do that till we've some idea of which rule they're breaking. How can we say to them: 'I strongly suspect you're not being trustworthy'? We've got to prove our words."