CHAPTER XV

THE LOWER FIFTH IS MUTE

The first lesson on Monday morning was with Miss Latham. The Lower Fifth, by way of marking the contrast, or perhaps in order to soothe their guilty consciences, had given extra attention to their preparation for the English mistress, and matters progressed swimmingly in consequence. Miss Latham dealt out good marks lavishly. Then, with a word of praise for the careful manner in which the form had prepared its work, she made way for Miss Burton.

It was the German lesson first.

"Let me see--I set an essay for your preparation, didn't I?" began the new mistress briskly. "Hilda Burns, you are head of this form, kindly collect the papers and bring them to me."

Hilda rose from her desk, then hesitated, while her eye swept round the classroom. Every member of the form sat rigidly at attention, while every desk was bare of essay papers. With a little gasp of nervousness, Hilda endeavoured to break the news of the Lower Fifth's unpreparedness for the lesson.

"If you please, Miss Burton, I don't think there are any essays to be given in."

Miss Burton stared at her in undisguised amazement.

"No essays? What do you mean, child? Do you mean to tell me that nobody in the whole form has had time to do their preparation?"

"I--I don't think there are any essays done," evaded Hilda.

Miss Burton continued to stare at the head of her form for a moment or two. Then a grim expression came over her face and she turned to the other girls.

"Hands up, please, those of you who have done the essay that I set," she commanded.

Not a hand was raised. The whole form sat in rigid stillness; and the mistress put her question in a slightly different form.

"Hands up those of you who have not done it," she said.

With a promptness that would have done the form credit in a drill display, a hand shot up from every girl, while a stifled giggle ran round the room at the look of blank astonishment that spread over the mistress's face.

"I shall be obliged if someone will enlighten me as to why this work has not been done," Miss Burton said at length in her stiffest manner. But although she waited for an answer, none came. Once more she turned to Hilda.

"Hilda Burns, will you please explain why the form has not done the preparation that I set?" she demanded. But there was no satisfactory explanation to be got out of Hilda. The head of the form blushed and stammered and fidgeted, but no coherent answer was forthcoming from her, and at last the mistress gave up the attempt to elicit one.

"Since you refuse to give me any explanation, I can only put down your omission to prepare the essay to rank laziness," she remarked icily. "Possibly you thought that as I was a newcomer, you could do what you liked in my classes. You will find that you have made a mistake, for I assure you that I am going to stand no nonsense. Of course, there will be no marks for this lesson, and you will write the essay for the next German class in addition to the fresh work which I shall set you. I had intended to read your essays aloud and criticise them in class, but since they are not written I cannot, of course, do that."

"Thank the Lord they aren't written, then," muttered Jack in an aside to Phyllis Tressider. Unfortunately for Jack, Miss Burton's quick ears caught the remark and she pounced upon the offender in a trice.

"Joanna Pym, take a bad mark," she snapped. Then she resumed her address to the rest of the form.

"Since I cannot carry out my original intention of criticising your essays, I am going to ask you questions in German which I shall expect you to answer in that language. Dorothy Pemberton, you are sitting at the end of a row, I shall begin with you. Everybody pay attention, please. Dorothy, 'Was hast du waehrend deinen Sommerferien getan?'"

It was a question to which Dorothy could have found any amount of suitable answers, but, mindful of the compact with the form, she sat in silence and the question passed to her next-door neighbour, Phyllis. Phyllis also passed it, and thereafter Miss Burton went from one girl to another without receiving any attempt at a reply. When the whole form had passed the question in dead silence, the mistress, quivering with anger, propounded another.

"'Warum halten die Dichter der Fruehling fuer die schoensten der Jahreszeiten?'" she inquired, with a ferocity which was rather at variance with the peaceful tenor of the question.

Once again it was Dorothy's turn to answer. Once again she passed the question, and once again it travelled right round the form without eliciting a response in German or in any other language.

"Does anybody know the meaning of this sentence?" asked Miss Burton sarcastically, still struggling to preserve her self-control. Everybody knew it, of course, but nobody would condescend to say so, and the class retained its stubborn demeanour.

Then the mistress could contain her wrath no longer. The storm broke, and for a quarter of an hour the Lower Fifth sat and listened to a raging denunciation of its stupidity, its crass ignorance and unbelievable insolence, poured out upon them in no measured terms. By rights, the Lower Fifth should have writhed in its seats as it listened to the fiery condemnation of its new form-mistress. But in reality it did no such thing. It was delighted at having aroused the enemy to such indignant anger, and the members of the form drank in with unholy joy the richness of the abuse poured out upon them.

Towards the end of the lesson, however, Miss Burton suddenly calmed down.

"It is evidently no use _my_ saying anything to you," she said. "We will see what Miss Oakley has to say when she hears about it."

It was a threat for which the Lower Fifth were prepared, certainly, but one which filled them with considerable uneasiness, nevertheless. The German lesson was over at last, but it was followed immediately by an algebra class which Miss Burton was also supposed to take. Absolutely no attempt had been made to touch the preparation set for it, and as soon as she had ascertained this fact, the mistress adopted a line of action for which the Lower Fifth was totally unprepared.

"Kindly put all your books and papers away in your desks. Pencils and indiarubbers, too, and rulers. Has everybody put everything away? Then you will all of you kindly sit in silence during this next hour. I do not intend to waste my time in trying to teach a class which refuses to allow itself to be taught. Since you have all elected to do nothing this morning, you can sit and _do_ it, while I correct exercises for the Upper Fourth."

And to the form's dismay, the new mistress immediately set to work upon a pile of exercise books, leaving the Lower Fifth to sit idle and silent until the lesson should be over.

It is one thing to do nothing while an angry mistress is trying to make you work! Quite another to sit doing it in deadly boredom for a whole hour! The Lower Fifth had not known before how long an hour could be. There were not even pencils to fidget about with, and the form felt that it would almost rather have been marched at once to Miss Oakley than have to endure this dreadful inaction any longer. But Miss Burton, having made up her mind to the penance her form should do, was adamant. She sat industriously correcting exercises, and addressed no remark at all to the rebels, except to deal out order marks when people fidgeted more than usual. By the time the hour was over quite a lot of these distinctions had been gained.

"Well, we shall have some marks to give in, anyway," said Jack, when the Lower Fifth was released at eleven o'clock recess to refresh itself with cocoa and biscuits in the dining-hall. "Better have bad marks to give in, I suppose, than none at all!"

"I wonder what she'll do when it comes to literature and she finds we haven't prepared for that, either," said Hilda, with rather a tragic expression on her face. Hilda's conscience was troubling her a good deal. She had very lively visions of what the headmistress would probably say about her responsibility as head of the form, when the matter should get to her ears.

"Treat us the same way as she did in algebra class, I expect," said Jack, with a grimace. "Wasn't it a rotten thing to go and do? I'd much rather she had raved at us like she did over the German--that really was rather fun!"

"It was rather cute of her, all the same," said Dorothy, with a sort of grudging admiration. "It made me feel rather mean when she settled down to correcting those papers like that. If she hadn't been quite so lavish with her bad marks all the time, I almost believe I might have repented a bit then."

"Oh, you'll repent all right, later on. Don't you worry about that," said Jack philosophically. "You just wait until Miss Oakley has given us a jawing. She'll make you feel an utter worm; you just see if she doesn't!"

"I know she will!" said Hilda, with a groan. "I say, don't you think we'd better give in and tell Miss Burton that we're sorry? There's a perfectly awful time waiting for us if we go on with the strike."

"We've gone too far to draw back now," said Dorothy. "So we may as well go on a little longer and see if we can't accomplish something. We've set out to show Miss Burton that she's come to an up-to-date public school, and that her old-fashioned kindergarten methods won't go down here. Don't let's give in before the campaign's properly begun!"

"Courage, _mes amis_," cried Jack gaily, waving a biscuit over her head. "The worst is still to come, I admit, but we are martyrs in a good cause. We'll teach Miss Burton a lesson before we've done! And if we burn our own fingers in the doing of it--well, we knew we shouldn't get off scot-free before we began, didn't we?"

"Anyway, we shall have a bit of a run for our money," observed Nita Fleming, who had only just joined the group. "Miss Oakley's gone away till Wednesday--I was in the hall just now and saw her drive off. That means Thursday before the row can come off, at the very earliest."

"Hurrah!" shouted Jack. "If we all hold together till then we shall have broken Miss Burton's spirit, and shown her that she can't treat us as though we were just a parcel of kids. Thursday--why, who knows, we may have brought her to terms by then!"

"There's the bell!" said Hilda. "Buck up! it's Mademoiselle first, and we don't want to be late for her."

The French lesson passed off most successfully, full marks being gained by the whole form. Then came a breathless moment while the form waited for the reappearance of Miss Burton. But to everybody's astonishment it was the head girl, Muriel Paget, who walked into the classroom at the conclusion of the French lesson.

"Miss Burton isn't coming to this class," announced the head girl in cold tones. "Miss Latham has asked me to come and sit here during the lesson. Get out your _Henry the Fifths_, please. You are to copy out