It was about this time that a wave of the occult passed over the school. It began with Daphne Johnson, who happened to read a magazine article on “The Borderland of the Spirit World,” and it spread like an epidemic of influenza. The supernatural was the topic of the hour. Ghost stories were at a premium, and any girl who could relate some creepy spiritual experience, which had happened to the second cousin of a friend of a friend of hers, was sure of a thrilled audience. This taste for the psychic was particularly strong among the girls of the Sixth Form, who leaned towards its intellectual and scientific aspects. They despised vulgar apparitions, but discussed such abstruse problems as phantasms of the living, thought transference, will power, hypnotism, and clairvoyance. Meta Wright dabbled a little in palmistry, and examined the hands of her schoolmates, prophesying startling events in their future careers. Lois Barlow sent half-a-crown to a ladies’ newspaper to have her horoscope cast, and was terribly dejected at the gloomy prospects offered her by the planets, till she fortunately discovered that she had put the date of her birth wrong by three hours, 79 which would, of course, completely alter the aspect of the heavenly bodies, and cause the best of astrologers to err. Veronica Terry talked darkly of experiences in the psychic world, of astral bodies, etheric doubles, elemental entities, and nature spirits. She went to sleep at night with her thumbs and big toes crossed, in the hope of bringing back the adventures of her dreams into her waking consciousness. She was a little hazy on the subject, but yearned for further instruction.

“It’s called ‘Yoga’,” she confided to her particular chum, Barbara Rowlands. “You concentrate your mind before you go to sleep, and then you’re able to function in the astral body. My cousin Winnie told me of a girl at College who did it, and she was seen standing in the room of a friend at the other side of the hostel, while all the time she was asleep in bed.”

“I hope you won’t do that!” shuddered Barbara nervously. “It would give me a fit if I woke up and found you staring at me, and knew it wasn’t really you. Promise you won’t!”

“It may be rather difficult to regulate one’s movements, once one is out of the body,” returned Veronica guardedly.

Barbara did not crave for spiritual excursions, and secretly preferred the old days, when her chum talked tennis instead of psychology; but the occult was paramount, and she was obliged to follow the fashion. The atmosphere of the Grange was certainly conducive to superstition. The dim passages and panelled walls looked haunted. Every accessory of the old mansion seemed a suitable background for a ghost. The juniors were frankly 80 frightened. They did not dare to go upstairs alone. They imagined skeleton fingers clutching their legs through the banisters, or bodiless heads rolling like billiard balls along the landings. Having listened, awestruck, to Veronica’s accounts of a sÉance, they were apprehensive lest the tables should turn sportive and caper about the rooms rapping out spirit messages, or boisterous elementals should bump the beds up and down and fling the china about.

“That only happens if there’s a powerful medium in the house,” Veronica had assured them, and the girls devoutly hoped that none of their number possessed the required mystic properties.

“Look here,” said Raymonde one day to Ardiune, “I’m getting rather fed up with this spook business.”

“So’m I,” agreed Ardiune. “I thought it was fun at first, but it’s got beyond the limit now. The sillies can talk of nothing else. I’m sick of sitting on Veronica’s bed and hearing about mediums and messages. I’d like a potato race for a change. I vote we get up some progressive games.”

“It would be more jinky! I fancy a good many are tired of ghosts, only they don’t like to say so. Ardiune! I’ve got an idea! While the school’s still mad on these things, why shouldn’t we have some fun out of it? Play a rag on them, you know.”

“Dress up in a sheet and rub wet matches on one’s hands?” suggested Ardiune.

“No, no! Nothing so stale as that! Why, it would hardly take in the juniors for more than a minute. I’m angling for bigger fish. I want to hook the Sixth!”

“H’m! Not so easy, my good girl!”

“It needs craft, of course, and one must have a suitable bait. The common or garden ghost trick would be useless. I want something subtle. If I could have developed mediumistic powers, now, and gone into a trance!”

“Couldn’t you?” queried Ardiune eagerly.

Raymonde shook a regretful head.

“Veronica knows too much about sÉances. She says the great test of the trance is to stick pins into the medium. If she doesn’t utter a groan, then her conscious entity is suspended, and a spirit is about to materialize. I couldn’t stand being a living pin-cushion. I know I’d squeal.”

“But we might pad you with cushions. SÉances are always held in the dark, so they wouldn’t find out.”

“Trust Veronica to find my vulnerable spot! She detests me, and she’d just enjoy prodding me up with pins. No, we must have something less painful than that, please.”

“Table-turning might be possible?”

“The Sixth did it, and the table was beginning to go round quite nicely when they discovered that Linda was pushing the leg. I think pretty nearly everything occult has been tried here lately, except just one. We’ve not had any crystal gazing.”

“How d’you do that?”

“Don’t you remember that chapter in Zilla, the Sahara Queen? How she goes to the Coptic magician, and he pours some ink into a little boy’s hand, and sees all her future in it?” 82

“Ink would stain horribly,” commented Ardiune.

“Yes, I don’t mean to use ink. What I want is a crystal. There’s something on Gibbie’s chimney-piece that would do jolly well. I believe I’ll borrow it! I know just how to manage, because Mabel and Sylvia went to consult a psychist in Bond Street, and they told me all about it, and everything she said and did. As a matter of fact she described Mabel’s fiancÉ quite wrong, and pretended she saw him sitting in a dug-out, while all the time he was on a battleship; but they thought it great fun, because they hadn’t really intended to believe her.”

“Would the girls believe you?”

“Certainly not as Raymonde Armitage. I don’t mean them to know me. We’re going to disguise ourselves, so that our very mothers wouldn’t own us.”

“Whew!”

Ardiune looked decidedly sceptical.

“Wait till I’ve done telling you before you pull faces, you old bluebottle! Can’t you trust me by now to get up a decent rag? Yes, I’m offended! All right, I’ll accept apologies. Now if you’re really listening, I’ll explain. You know the gipsies are camping down by the river. Everybody in the school has noticed their caravans, and realizes they’re there. Now what’s more natural than for a couple of these gipsies to stroll round by the barn some evening during recreation time, and offer to predict the future? Katherine and Ave could be in the secret, have their fortunes told first, and then bring others. We’d install ourselves in the old 83 cow-house; it’s so dark, no one would see us very plainly.”

“Ray, you’ve enough imagination for a novelist!” murmured Ardiune admiringly.

Having settled their plan of campaign, the next step was to carry out details. The question of costume loomed largest.

“We must look real gipsies, not stage ones,” decreed Raymonde. “The thing’s got to be done properly, if it’s done at all.”

They ransacked the property box used for school theatricals, and having selected some likely garments, set to work on an ideal of realism. Two skirts were carefully torn on nails, artistically stained with rust and mud, and rubbed on the barn floor to give them an extra tone. Some cotton bodices were similarly treated. Shoes were a knotty problem, for gipsies do not generally affect trim footgear, yet nobody at the Grange possessed worn-out or dilapidated boots. In the end Raymonde carefully unpicked the stitches in her oldest pairs to give them the requisite burst appearance, and with the aid of a file rubbed the respectability from them. A dip in the mud of the moat completed the transformation. Some cheap beads and coloured handkerchiefs, and a faint wash of Vandyke brown over face and hands, gave the finishing touches.

In the interval between preparation and supper, when several members of the Sixth Form were pursuing carpentry and other industrial occupations in the barn, Aveline Kerby entered to borrow a screw-driver. She conversed casually on the topics of wood-carving, photography, pressed flowers, 84 and kindred hobbies; then, just as she was leaving, turned back and remarked, apparently as an afterthought:

“Oh, by the by, do you know there are two gipsies in the cow-house? They’re from the caravan by the river. They came in through the back gate, begging, and Morvyth happened to meet them. They offered to tell her fortune, so she took them into the cow-house, so that Gibbie shouldn’t see them. She says they’re marvellous. They described her mother exactly, and her brother at the front. Isn’t it wonderful now they can do it?”

“Are they there still?” asked Veronica, swallowing the bait.

“I believe so. At least they were, five minutes ago. Elsie Moseley and Cynthia Greene had gone to see them. I’d go myself, but I’ve spent all my allowance, and of course one has to cross their palms with the orthodox piece of silver, I suppose. It’s hard luck to be stony-broke. Ta-ta! Thanks for the screw-driver!”

Aveline beat a judicious retreat, and left her words to work. As she had expected, the news of the arrival of the occultists was received with interest.

“It’s an extraordinary thing that gipsies are so often gifted with psychic powers,” commented Meta.

“They’re children of nature,” returned Veronica. “I suppose our ultra-civilization blunts our astral perceptions. One finds marvellous things among the hill tribes in India—things that can’t be explained by any known rules of science.”

“I suppose these ancient races have inherited secrets that we can’t grasp?” 85

“Yes, they follow forgotten laws of nature. Some day, no doubt, science will rediscover them.”

Veronica spoke seriously. During the holidays she had studied the subject by the aid of books borrowed from the Free Library.

“I should like just to go and have a look at these gipsies,” she added. “Will you come with me?”

She voiced the feelings of the others. They rose with one accord, and went in the direction of the cow-shed. They met Cynthia Greene and Elsie Moseley coming out, half-awed, half-giggling. At the sight of monitresses they dived round the corner of the building, and escaped into the orchard.

“It’s certainly our duty to investigate,” propounded Meta.

It is pleasant when duty and inclination coincide. The girls walked forward briskly. The interior of the cow-house was dark as an Eastern temple. The gipsies had established themselves in the dimmest corner, and were squatting on bundles of straw under a manger. Obviously they were extremely dirty and dilapidated. Their hands and faces appeared to be unacquainted with soap and water, their clothes were tattered, their shoes seemingly in the last stage of decrepitude.

“Tell your fortunes, my pretty ladies?” pattered one of the Romanys. Her voice was hoarse but conciliatory. Possibly she had a cold—tents are notoriously draughty sleeping-places.

“We don’t care about vulgar fortunes, we are really interested,” commenced Veronica. “What we’d like to know is how you get your powers. Where does your knowledge of the future come from? I’ve always wanted to ask this.” 86

The gipsy woman shook her head pityingly.

“Ah, lady! We don’t know ourselves! It comes to us suddenly. Like a flash of light we see your future—then it fades. It’s a sixth sense that’s given to the poor gipsies. They’re born with it, and they can’t explain it any more than you can explain the breath of your body.”

“I’ve often heard of this sixth sense,” whispered Daphne to Lois.

“Sometimes we feel what’s going to be, and sometimes we see it,” continued the gipsy, fumbling with something in her lap. “We can’t tell beforehand which way the knowledge will come.”

“What’s that you’ve got there?” asked Veronica sharply. “Is it a crystal?”

“You’re right, lady. It is a crystal, and a wonderful one too. My grandmother got it from—but no! I’d best not be telling that. I wouldn’t part with it, lady, if the Queen offered me her crown in exchange. Take it in your hand! Look how it sparkles! It doesn’t often shine like that—only when someone with the sixth sense holds it.”

“I’ve sometimes suspected that I possess psychic powers!” murmured Veronica complacently.

“Would you like to learn the future, lady?” queried the gipsy. “Then hold it so, in your hands, for a minute. Now it has felt you and known you, and it will tell—oh, yes! it will tell!”

She took the crystal again, and turned to the companion who squatted beside her on the floor.

“Zara! Look what is coming to the lady,” she commanded softly.

Zara, who had apparently been in a deep reverie, roused herself with a start, placed the crystal in her 87 lap with the first finger and the thumb of each hand lightly touching it, and stared fixedly into the magic glass. For a moment or two the future seemed obscured, then evidently it cleared. She began to speak in a deep, monotonous voice, as if talking in her sleep.

“I see the sea—waves—waves—everywhere. There is a ship—oh! it has changed. I see sand, and a white house, and palm trees. A soldier in khaki is coming out of the house. He stops to speak to a servant—a black man in a turban—he is angry—he frowns—he goes again into the white house. Oh, it is fading—it is gone!”

“My brother Leslie’s in Egypt!” gasped Veronica, much impressed.

She would have requested a continuance of the vision, but at that moment the dressing-bell clanged loudly. It was plainly time to go and tidy up for supper.

“If you could come again to-morrow about five,” she suggested, pressing a coin into the gipsy’s ready hand.

“Yes, lady, if we’re still in the neighbourhood. We never know when we’ll be moving on, you see. But we’ll try to oblige you if we can.”

Raymonde’s and Ardiune’s toilets that evening would have done credit to quick-change variety artistes. With clean faces and hands, and their dresses at least half fastened, they slipped into their places at the supper-table just in time; a little flurried, perhaps, but preserving an outward calm. So far their scheme had succeeded admirably. The Sixth appeared to have no suspicions.

They repeated their performance on the following 88 day, installing themselves in the cow-house, and receiving relays of enquirers who came to consult them as to their future. Knowing somewhat of the private history of each member of the school, they got on excellently, and their reputation spread till more than half the girls had paid surreptitious visits to their retreat. All might have gone well, and their secret might have remained undiscovered, had it not been for Veronica’s friendship with Mademoiselle. Veronica was so impressed with the value of the crystal’s information that she could not help confiding the news, and bringing the impressionable Belgian to consult the seer for herself.

Ardiune’s visions of smoking ruins and rescued refugees left Mademoiselle almost speechless. She in her turn felt impelled to seek a confidante, and imparted the wonderful revelations to Miss Gibbs.

That worthy lady immediately set off for the cow-house. As she entered there was a scuttling of juniors, who sought safety behind the partition. Raymonde stared for a moment aghast, then whispered to Ardiune: “Bluff it out!”

Miss Gibbs proceeded in an absolutely business-like manner. She requested a consultation, and listened while the gipsy, decidedly nervous, gave a rambling description of a dark gentleman and an Indian temple.

“Thank you,” she said at last. “I think it only fair to warn you that you can be prosecuted and fined twenty-five pounds for telling fortunes. I should like to know where you got that crystal! It’s remarkably like the ball of glass that was broken off my Venetian vase. I missed it yesterday from my mantelpiece. By the by”—stooping 89 down suddenly, and pulling aside the handkerchief from Zara’s swarthy neck—“you are wearing a locket and chain that I know to be the property of one of my pupils. It is my duty immediately to put you in the hands of the police.”

The game was up! The disconcerted gipsies rose from their alcove, and came back from the psychic to the material world. It was a hard, exacting, unsympathetic world as mirrored in Miss Gibbs’s keen grey eyes. She told them briefly to go and wash their faces and change their attire, then to report themselves in the class-room, where she would be at work correcting exercises.

“You can bring with you the money that you have collected over this business,” she added.

Half an hour later, two clean, tidy, but dejected pupils entered the class-room, and placed the sum of thirteen and ninepence upon her desk. Miss Gibbs counted it over scrupulously.

“Any girls who were foolish enough to give you this, deserve to lose it,” she remarked, “and I shall send it as a contribution to the Red Cross Fund. You will each learn two pages of Curtis’s Historical Notes by heart, and repeat them to me to-morrow after morning school. I may mention that I consider it a great liberty for any girl to enter my bedroom and remove ornaments from my mantelpiece.”

That evening, after preparation and supper, the entire school, instead of being allowed to pursue fancy work, was summoned to the lecture hall, and harangued by Miss Beasley upon the follies and dangers of superstition. She touched upon ancient beliefs in witchcraft, and modern credulity in clairvoyance 90 and spiritualism, and placed an equal ban upon both.

“In these enlightened times, with all the advantages of education to dispel ignorance,” she concluded, “it is incredible to me that anybody can still be found ready to believe in such nonsense. I beg you all, and especially those elder girls who should be leaders of the rest, to turn your thoughts and conversation to some healthier topic, and to let these morbid fancies sink into the obscurity they deserve.”

“It was a nasty hit for the monitresses!” whispered Ardiune to Raymonde afterwards. “Did you see Veronica turning as red as beetroot? We’ll have to wake early to-morrow morning, and swat at those wretched dates. It was grizzly bad luck Gibbie found us out!”

“But on the whole the game was worth the candle!” proclaimed Raymonde unrepentantly.