Have you ever thought about what fiction is? Probably, such a question may seem surprising: and so everything is clear. Every person throughout his life has to repeatedly create the works he needs for specific purposes - statements, autobiographies, dictations - using not gypsum or clay, not musical notes, not paints, but just a word. At the same time, almost every person will be very surprised if he is told that he thereby created a work of fiction, which is very different from visual art, music and sculpture making. However, everyone understands that a student's essay or dictation is fundamentally different from novels, short stories, news that are created by professional writers. In the works of professionals there is the most important difference - excogitation. But, oddly enough, in a school literature course, you don’t realize the full power of fiction. So using our website in your free time discover fiction for yourself. For the Sake of the School by Angela Brazil (beginner reading books for adults TXT) 📖
- Author: Angela Brazil
Book online «For the Sake of the School by Angela Brazil (beginner reading books for adults TXT) 📖». Author Angela Brazil
A chain of circumstances flashed through Ulyth's mind, each unfortunate link fitting only too well. The evidence seemed almost overwhelming. Rona had been present at the meeting by the stream when Tootie incited the juniors to some secret act of rebellion against the school rules. What this act was the occurrence in the garden had plainly shown. That Rona had been implicated seemed a matter of certainty. Her brooch had been in the possession of the cake-vendor, and she had chocolates in her bedroom, the acquisition of which she had refused to explain. Did she intend to keep the pendant and exchange it for confectionery? Her pocket-money, as Ulyth knew, was exhausted, and she had hardly any of the trinkets that most girls wear.
"Ulyth Stanton, you are not attending to your work. Give me your answer to Problem 46."
Ulyth started guiltily. Her page was still a blank, and she had no answer to produce. She murmured a lame excuse, and Miss Harding glared at her witheringly. Thrusting her preoccupation resolutely aside, she made an effort to concentrate her thoughts upon the subject in hand.
The morning passed slowly on. To Ulyth each successive class seemed interminable. At recreation, the girls, in small clumps, discussed the one topic of the hour.[Pg 229]
"I'm not surprised. I'd think anything of Rona Mitchell," said Stephanie. "What else could you expect of a girl from the backwoods?"
"But she was so much improved," urged Addie, who had rather a weakness for the Cuckoo.
"Only a veneer. She relapsed directly she got the chance, you see."
"But why should she take your pendant?"
"I can't pretend to explain her motive, but take it she did—stealing, I should call it. But we're too polite at The Woodlands to use such a strong word."
"What'll be done to her?"
"Pack her back to New Zealand, I hope—and a good riddance. I always said she wasn't a suitable girl to come to this school. She hasn't the traditions of a lady. You might as well try to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear as to get such a girl to realize the meaning of noblesse oblige. It's birth that counts, after all, when it comes to the test."
"There I think you're wrong, Stephie," put in Lizzie quietly. "Gentle birth is all very well if it involves preserving a code of honour, but in itself it's no hall-mark of character. Some of the humblest and poorest people have been the stanchest on a question of right, when those above them in station have failed utterly. A charwoman can have quite as high standards as a duchess, and often lives up to them much better."
"Oh, you're a Radical!"
"I want fair play all round, and I must say that[Pg 230] Rona has been very straight and square so far. Nobody has ever accused her of sneaking."
"No; the bear cub was unpolished, but not a vicious little beastie," agreed Addie.
"And it had grown wonderfully tame of late," added Christine.
Rona did not appear at the dinner-table; she had been removed from her own bedroom to a small spare room on another landing. She still refused to answer any question put to her. Her silence seemed unaccountable, and the Principals could only consider it as a display of temper.
"She was annoyed at being caught red-handed with the pendant in her possession, and she won't give in and acknowledge her wrongdoing," said Miss Teddington to Miss Bowes.
"From a strong hint Cook gave me last night I fear there is something more behind it all," returned her partner. "I shall question every girl in the school separately until I get at the truth."
Beginning with the monitresses, Miss Bowes summoned each pupil in turn to her study and subjected her to a very strict catechism. From the Sixth she gained no information. They formed a clique amongst themselves, and knew little of the doings of the younger girls. V A were likewise absorbed in their own interests, and only classed Rona as one among many juniors. It was now the turn of V b, and Miss Bowes sent for Ulyth a trifle more hopefully. She, at least, would have an intimate knowledge of her room-mate.[Pg 231]
"Have you ever known Rona mixed up in any deceit before? What is her general report among her form-mates?" asked the Principal.
"Very square. She used to annoy me dreadfully when first she came by turning over all my things, but she soon stopped when I told her how horrid it was. She never dreamt of taking anything. It was the merest curiosity; she hadn't been taught differently at home."
"Have you found her eating sweets or cakes in her bedroom lately?"
Ulyth hesitated and blushed.
"Ah! I see you have! You must tell me, Ulyth. Keep nothing back."
Very unwilling to betray her friend, Ulyth admitted the fact that chocolate had been pressed upon her one evening.
"Did Rona explain where she got it?"
"No, she wouldn't tell me anything."
Miss Bowes looked thoughtful.
"I put you upon your honour, Ulyth, to answer this question perfectly frankly. Have you any reason to suspect that some of the juniors have surreptitiously been buying cakes and sweets?"
Thus asked point-blank, Ulyth was obliged to relate what she had overheard; and Miss Bowes, determined to get at the root of the business, cross-questioned her closely, until she had dragged from her reluctant pupil the account of the occurrence in the garden and the conversation with the travelling hawker-woman.
"This is more serious even than I had feared,"[Pg 232] groaned Miss Bowes. "I thought I could have trusted my girls."
"I think most of them were ashamed of it," ventured Ulyth.
"It is just possible that Rona refuses to speak because she will not involve her schoolfellows."
"Oh yes, yes!" cried Ulyth, clutching at any straw to excuse her room-mate's conduct. "That's quite likely. Or, Miss Bowes, I've been thinking that perhaps it was a queer kind of loyalty to me. You know Rona's very fond of me, and she was quite absurdly angry because Stephanie's pendant was to go to the exhibition and not mine. She may have changed them, hoping it wouldn't be noticed and that mine would be packed up, and perhaps she intended to put Stephanie's back in the studio when the parcel had safely gone. Rona does such impulsive things."
Miss Bowes shook her head sadly.
"I wish I could think so. Unfortunately the other circumstances lend suspicion to a graver motive."
Ulyth walked from the study feeling that she had told far more than she wished.
"I've given Rona away," she said to herself. "Miss Bowes is thinking the very worst of her, I know. Oh dear! I wish she'd explain, and not keep up this dreadful silence. It's so unlike her. She's generally almost too ready to talk. If I could see her even for a few minutes I believe she would tell me. Perhaps Miss Teddington frightened her. Poor Rona! She must be so utterly miserable. Could I possibly get a word with her, I wonder?"
She talked the matter over with Lizzie.
"If I ask Miss Bowes, she'll probably say no," lamented Ulyth.
"Then I shouldn't ask," returned Lizzie. "We've not been definitely forbidden to see Rona."
"The door's locked."
"You've only to climb out of the linen-room window on to the roof of the veranda."
"Why, so I could. Oh, I must speak to her!"
"I think you are justified, if you can get anything out of her. She'd tell you better than anybody else in the whole school."[Pg 234]
"I'll try my luck then."
"I'll stand in the garden below and shout 'Cave!' if I hear anyone coming."
To help her unfortunate room-mate seemed the first consideration to Ulyth, and she thought the end certainly justified the means. She waited until after the tea interval, when most of the girls would be playing tennis or walking in the glade; then, making sure that Lizzie was watching in the garden below, she stole upstairs to the linen-room. It was quite easy to drop from the window on to the top of the veranda, and not very difficult, in spite of the slope, to walk along to the end of the roof. Here an angle of the old part of the house jutted out, and the open window of Rona's prison faced her only a couple of yards away. She could not reach across the gap, but conversation would be perfectly possible.
"Rona!" she called cautiously. "Rona!"
There was a movement inside the room, and a face appeared at the window. Rona's eyes were red and swollen with crying, and her hair hung in wild disorder. At the sight of Ulyth she started, and stared rather defiantly.
"Rona! Rona, dear! I've been longing to see you. I felt I must speak to you."
No reply. Rona, in fact, turned her back.
"I'm so dreadfully sorry," continued Ulyth. "I've been thinking about you all day. It's no use keeping this up. Do confess and have done with it."
Rona twisted round suddenly and faced Ulyth.
"Rona! You'd be so much happier if you'd[Pg 235] own up you'd taken it. Surely you only meant it as a joke on Stephie? Miss Bowes will forgive you. For the sake of the school, do!"
Then Rona spoke.
"You ask me to confess—you, of all people!" she exclaimed with unconcealed bitterness.
"Yes, dear. I can't urge it too strongly."
"You want me to tell Miss Bowes that I took that pendant?"
"There's no sense in concealing it, Rona."
The Cuckoo's eyes blazed. Her hands gripped the window-sill.
"Oh, this is too much! It's the limit! I couldn't have believed it possible! You, Ulyth! you to ask me this! How can you? How dare you?"
Ulyth gazed at her in perplexity. She could not understand such an outburst.
"Surely I, your own chum, have the best right to speak to you for your own good?"
"My own good!" repeated Rona witheringly. "Yours, you mean. Oh yes, it's all very fine for you, no doubt! You're to get off scot free."
"I? What are you talking about?"
"Don't pretend you don't understand. You atrocious sneak and hypocrite—you took the pendant yourself!"
If she had been accused of purloining the Crown jewels from the Tower of London, Ulyth could not have been more astonished.
"I——!" she stammered. "I——!"
"Yes, you, and you know it. I saw you."[Pg 236]
"You couldn't!"
"But I did, or as good as saw you. Who came into our room last night, I should like to know, when Miss Lodge had sent me to bed, and slipped something into one of the blouses hanging behind the door? I'd forgotten by the morning, but I remembered when the pendant came jerking out of my pocket."
"Certainly I didn't put it there!"
"But you did. You came into the room, took off your outdoor coat, and threw it on your bed. I got up, afterwards, and hung it up in your wardrobe for you. Irene told me how you'd joined the cake club. She said you had the password quite pat."
Ulyth was too aghast to answer. Rona, once she had broken silence, continued in a torrent of indignation.
"You a Torch-bearer! You might well ask me not to expose you! 'Remember the Camp-fire,' you said. Yes, it's because of the Camp-fire, and for the sake of the school, that I've kept your secret. Don't be afraid. I'm not going to tell. It wouldn't be good for the League if a Torch-bearer toppled down so low! It doesn't matter so much for only a Wood-gatherer. I won't betray a chum—I've brought that much honour from the Bush; but I'll let you know what I think about you, at any rate."
Then, her blaze of passion suddenly fading, she burst into tears.
"Ulyth, Ulyth, how could you?" she sobbed. "You who taught me everything that was good.[Pg 237] I believed in you so utterly, I'd never have thought it of you. Oh, why——"
"Cave! cave!" shouted Lizzie excitedly below. "Cave! Teddie herself!"
Ulyth turned and fled with more regard for speed than safety along the veranda roof, and scrambled through the window into the linen-room again. She was trembling with agitation. Such an extraordinary development of the situation was as appalling as it was unexpected. She must have time to think it over. She could not bear to speak to anybody about it at present, not even to Lizzie. No, she must be alone. She ran quickly downstairs, and, before Lizzie had time to find her, dived under the laurels of the shrubbery and made her way first down the garden and then to the very bottom of the paddock
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