The rope-climbing, however, left the result still undetermined. Both Jean and Babs reached the top in six seconds, blew the trumpet they found there with a vigour that sent the spectators into a peal of merriment, and slid down again, much pleased with themselves and the interest they were exciting. Charlotte Bigley on the third rope excelled them in speed and reached the top in five seconds, but forgot to blow the trumpet, and so made things even once more. The junior division filed out again, while Miss Finlayson and the expert and Hurly-Burly put their heads together on the platform, and Herr Scales thought the moment an appropriate one for a performance in his best manner of his favourite composition, which was called Sonnenschein and had been thumped out in the holidays to half the parents in the room.
Miss Finlayson rose to her feet again. As the three competitors she had already mentioned were still equal, she must call upon each of them to do one of the advanced exercises, Charlotte on the ladder and the other two on the rings; they were to choose their own exercises, and if they again proved themselves equally good, the prize would be divided. The spectators were in a pleasant state of interest by this time, and the three little rivals were greeted with enthusiasm when they stepped out of the anteroom for the last time and took up their positions in front of the platform. They looked very small and slight as they stood there in their short red frocks against a solid background of people; but they had quite lost every suspicion of bashfulness, and Babs even began to look upon the whole thing as an immense joke. She nodded gaily to the boys in the gallery, and smiled happily at Auntie Anna, who had the place of honour on the platform next to the Canon; and in the silence that followed, while Charlotte Bigley was jumping from rung to rung of the horizontal ladder, she occupied herself in trying to decide on her own exercise. If Jean chose leaving go with one hand, she should swing and let go and catch on to the trapeze beyond–at least, if Hurly-Burly would only be decent and give her leave. She half hoped that Jean would choose the other; for she had practised the trapeze one, only last week, and––
A sudden murmur, followed by a faint attempt at applause, roused her; and she saw Charlotte Bigley walking slowly back to the anteroom with her eyes fixed on the ground.
‘What happened? I didn’t see,’ she whispered, nudging Jean.
‘Hand slipped, fell off,’ answered Jean, briefly, as she went forward and grasped the rings.
She did choose swinging and letting go with one hand, and she went through it very successfully, and earned every bit of the applause that greeted her when she finished. Barbara was so delighted that she went on clapping her loudly after everybody else had stopped, and did not notice what she was doing till the audience began to laugh and Hurly-Burly came up and spoke to her.
‘May I have the trapeze let down?’ whispered Babs, eagerly. ‘I want to let go of the rings and catch on to it at the end of my swing–like I did the other day.’
Hurly-Burly looked doubtful. ‘Are you sure you can manage it?’ she asked.
Barbara pleaded, and the games-mistress gave in. It was always difficult for any one so practical as Miss Burleigh to understand the odd little pupil, who at one moment could throw herself into a game as heartily as a boy, and at another was liable to exasperate her companions by going off into a dream and completely forgetting what she was doing. But it was impossible to help liking the child, and Hurly-Burly, who had a sneaking conviction that the trapeze exercise would decide the prize in her favour, could not resist the temptation to let her have her own way and secure to herself at the same time a little reflected glory. For it was she who had taught Barbara the exercise, and she had every reason to be proud of her pupil. So she let down the trapeze from the roof and held it back with her hands, ready to drop it forward when the child had worked up her swing.
The eyes of the German music-master were filled with sentimental interest, as the youngest girl in the school stepped up to the rings. He knew very little about gymnastics, though a German; for his life had been passed almost entirely in other lands, and during the brief period he had spent in his own country he had been so absorbed in his art that he had completely neglected the physical culture that is of so much importance to most Germans. As for girls’ gymnastics, his experience in them had been entirely confined to a few occasions like the present, when he was asked to play instead of the junior music-mistress. But he never assisted at the usual lessons, when the junior music-mistress was considered good enough to perform; so Miss Finlayson’s remarks on the merits of the three competitors conveyed very little to him. Still, he managed to gather that Barbara stood a good chance of winning the prize, and his fat, benevolent face beamed with satisfaction in consequence. It was true that the little Fräulein with the black, black eyes and the wonder-clumsy fingers had no more talent for music than his tabby cat, while the performances of Fräulein Vilkins were the joy of his heart; but it was the little one who asked him so many questions about his beloved Germany, which she seemed to regard as being about the size of Kensington Gardens, and he forgave her all her excruciating false notes for the sake of her warm heart, which was colossal. When he saw her standing there all alone, he quite gave up trying to be brilliant and dropped into a little simple melody of his own, which he had never thought important enough to name, but which Barbara had always told him in her funny English was ‘awfully fine.’ Unfortunately, just as she recognised the notes and nodded at him with a little smile, Jean brought him a message from the games-mistress, asking him not to play at all until the exercise was over.