Part 7

As to Gideon, I licked him rather badly in two rounds and a half. Then he was mopped up and dressed, and screwed in his front tooth again with the greatest ease.

Once it got known about this tooth, and fellows were naturally excited. Steggles said it was on the principle of a tobacco-pipe mouthpiece; and, finding the chaps were keen to see it, Gideon let it be generally known he would freely show it to anybody for threepence a time, and to friends for twopence. But this was a safe reduction to make, because, properly speaking, he hadn’t any friends. Seeing there were nearly 200 boys at Dunston’s, and that certainly half, including several fellows from the Sixth, took a pleasure in seeing the tooth, and didn’t mind the rather high charge, Gideon did jolly well; and in the case of Nubby Tomkins, he made actually one shilling and threepence; because the tooth had a most peculiar fascination for Nubby, and he saw it no less than five times. After that Gideon made a reduction to him, as well he might. But somehow Slade, the head of the school, was very averse to Gideon’s front tooth when he heard about it, and he decided that there must be no more exhibitions of it for money. He told Gideon so himself.

However, a new boy came a week afterwards and heard about the strangeness of the tooth, and offered a shilling, in three instalments, to see it; which was too much temptation for Gideon, and he showed it, contrary to what Slade had said.

Slade, of course, heard, for the new boy happened to be his own cousin, though called Saunders; and then there was a curious scene in the playground, which I fortunately saw. Slade came up to Gideon in the very quiet way he has, and asked him in a perfectly gentlemanly voice for his front tooth. At first Gideon seemed inclined not to give it up, but he saw what an awfully serious thing that would be, and finally unscrewed it, though not willingly.

“Now,” said Slade, “I’ll have no more of this penny peep-show business at Merivale. I told you once, and you have disobeyed me. So there’s an end of your beastly tooth. What’s this?”

He took something out of his pocket.

“It’s a catapult,” said Gideon.

“It is,” said Slade, “and I’m going to use your tooth instead of a bullet, and fire it into space.”

“It cost five guineas,” said Gideon.

“Don’t care if it cost a hundred,” answered Slade, still in a very gentlemanly sort of way. “We can’t have this sort of thing here, you know.”

Slade was just going to fire into space, as he had said, when a robin suddenly settled within thirty yards of us, on the wall between the playground and old Grimbal’s. Slade being a wonderful shot with a catapult (having once shot a wood-pigeon), suddenly fired at the robin, and only missed it by about four inches. He said the shape of a front tooth was very unfavorable for shooting. But, anyway, the tooth went over into Grimbal’s, and we distinctly heard it hit against the side of his house.

Then Slade went away, and we rotted Gideon rather, because not having the tooth looked rum, and made a difference in his voice. He took it very quietly, and said he rather thought his father would be able to summon Slade; and before evening school, having marked down the spot where he fancied his tooth had hit Grimbal’s house, he went to look with a box of matches. What happened afterwards he told us frankly; and it was certainly true, because, with all his faults, Gideon never lied to anybody.

“I went quietly over, and began carefully looking along the bottom of the wall, using a match to every foot or so,” he said, "and I had done about half when I heard a door open. I then hooked it, and ran almost on to old Grimbal. He had not opened the door at all, but was coming up the garden path at the critical moment. Of course, he caught me. He was going to rub it into me with his stick, when I said I should think it very kind if he would hear me first, as I had a perfectly good excuse for being there.

"He said:

"‘What excuse can you have for trespassing in my garden, you little oily wretch?’

"‘Oily wretch’ was what he called me; and I said that my tooth had been fired into his garden that very day, about half-past one, by a chap with a catapult; and I lighted a match and showed him it was missing.

"He said:

"‘How the deuce are you going to find a tooth in a garden this size?’ And I told him I had marked it down very carefully, and that it had cost five guineas, and that I rather believed my father would be able to summon the chap who had shot it away. He seemed a good deal interested, and said he thought very likely he might, if it was robbery with violence. Then he asked me if I was the boy he had seen beating down the price of a purse at Wilkinson’s in Merivale, and I said I was. Then he said, ‘Come in and have a bit of cake, boy’; and I went in and had a bit of cake, and saw on a shelf in his room about fifty or sixty cricket-balls, and various things which he has collared when they went over. He asked me a lot of questions about different things, and I answered them. All he said was about money. He also asked me to be good enough to value the things he had, which came over the wall from time to time; and I did, and he thanked me. They were worth fifteen shillings and tenpence; and Wright’s ball, which everybody thought was stolen by the milkman, wasn’t, for old Grimbal’s got it; and the milkman should be told and apologized to.

"Well, he knew a lot about money, and told me he had thousands of golden sovereigns, which he makes breed into thousands more.

"He said:

"‘You’re the only boy I ever met with a grain of sense in his head. Now, if I gave you a check on my bankers in Merivale for five pounds to-day, and wrote to you to-morrow morning to say I had changed my mind, what would you do?’

“I said, ‘It would be too late, sir, because your check would have been sent off to my father that very night, to put out at interest for me.’ He said, ‘That’s right. Never give back money, or anything.’ Then he asked me my name, and told me I might come back to-morrow and look for my tooth by daylight.”

That was Gideon’s most peculiar adventure, and, though he never found the tooth or saw old Grimbal again, yet about seven or eight months afterwards, when old Grimbal was discovered all curiously twisted up and dead in bed by the man who took him his breakfast, the result of Gideon’s visit to him came out. Old Grimbal had specially put him into his will by some legal method, and Doctor Dunston had Gideon into his study three days after old Grimbal kicked. It then was proved that old Grimbal had left Gideon all the things that came over the wall, and also a legacy of fifty pounds in money, because, according to the bit of the will which the Doctor read to Gideon out of a lawyer’s letter, he was the only boy old Grimbal had ever met with who showed any intelligence above that of the anthropoid ape.

Gideon returned all the balls and things to their owners free of charge, but not until the rightful owners proved they were so. And the money he sent to his father; and his father, he told me afterwards, was so jolly pleased about the whole affair that he added nine hundred and fifty pounds to old Grimbal’s fifty. Therefore, by shooting Gideon’s front tooth at a robin, Slade was actually putting the enormous sum of one thousand pounds into Gideon’s pocket, which I should think was about the rummest thing that ever happened in the world.

Gideon stopped at Dunston’s one term after that. Then he went away, and, I believe, began to help his father to sell diamonds. He was fairly good at French, and very at German; but of other things he knew rather little, except arithmetic, and his was the most beautiful arithmetic which had ever been done at Merivale; for I heard Stokes, who was a seventeenth wrangler in his time, tell the Doctor so.

The Chemistry Class

This story about Guy Fawkes’s Night at Dunston’s is worth knowing, because it shows the rumminess of Nubby Tomkins. Tomkins, I may say, was called “Nubby,” owing to his nose, which was extremely huge, though he said it was Roman, and swore he wouldn’t change it if he could. Anyway, Bradwell made a rhyme about it that is certainly good enough to repeat. He wrote it first on a black-board with chalk, and a good many chaps learned it by heart.

It ran like this:

“Our Nubby’s nose is ponderous, And our Nubby’s nose is long; So it wouldn’t disgrace Our Nubby’s face If half his nose was gone.”

Which was not only jolly good poetry, but also true--a thing all poetry isn’t by long chalks, as you can see in Virgil and such like.

Well, Nubbs sang the solos in chapel on Sundays, and people came from far to hear him do it; in consequence of which, so Steggles said, the Doctor favored him, and regarded him as an advertisement to Dunston’s. But his singing wasn’t in it compared with the advertisement he gave the Doctor on Guy Fawkes’s Night the term before Slade left.

To explain the whole tremendous thing I must tell you that Nubbs belonged to the chemistry class. This class, in fact, was pretty well started for him, his father telling Dunston, so Nubbs said, that he shouldn’t send him at all if he couldn’t be taught chemistry; because Nubbs had shown a good deal of keenness for chemicals generally from the earliest days, and bought little boxes of “serpents’ eggs” and red fire instead of sweets ever since he was old enough to buy anything. He had also blown off his eyebrows and eyelashes with a mixture he was grinding up in a mortar, and they had never grown again to this day--all of which things showed he had chemistry in him to a great extent. So the Doctor started a chemistry class, and a chap called Stoddart, from Merivale, came up once a week to take it; and Nubbs joined, and so did I, not because I had chemistry in me worth speaking of, but because I was a chum of Nubby’s. Wilson also joined, and so did Hodges. I may mention my name is Mathers.

I always thought that chemists simply mix the muck doctors give you when you’re queer, but it seems not. In fact, there are several sorts of chemists, and Nubbs said he hoped to belong to the best sort, who don’t have bottles of red and green stuff in the windows, and so on. He said a man who sold pills and tooth-brushes, and liquorice-root and soap, could not be considered a classy chemist. The real flyers made discoveries and froze air, and sneaked one another’s inventions, and got knighted by the Queen if they had luck and if they were well thought of by the newspapers. I should think really Nubbs might come to being knighted if he sticks to it, for even down to the stuff in cough lozenges nothing is hid from him.

Once the matron gave me simply a vile lozenge for my throat, which got a bit foggy owing to falling into the water during “hare and hounds.” Well, the lozenge was white in color, but even a white lozenge may be very decent sometimes, so I took a shot at it going to bed. But it was so jolly frightful to the taste that I chucked it away, and next morning found it again and examined it after drying. On it I then found the words “Chlorate of potash.” So I took it to Nubbs. He said it was certainly a chemical, and added that the stuff in it was almost the same as you make “Pharaoh’s serpents” with. I could hardly believe such a thing, so he lighted the lozenge and it burned blue, and a long, wriggling, brownish ash came curling out of it like a snake, just as Nubby said, which is well worth knowing to anybody who ever has a chlorate of potash lozenge. Many such like remarkable and useful things Nubby could tell you; among others, how to mix sulphur and gunpowder and other ingredients for fireworks. He had, in fact, an awful fine book devoted to the subject, and wooden affairs to load cases; and once when Stoddart didn’t turn up and the Doctor put us on our honor to do the proper things in the laboratory alone, Nubbs finished off analyzing some mess in about five minutes, and spent the complete rest of the time making a rocket. It had four blue stars and thirteen yellow ones, and the case was made out of a stiff brown paper roll in which his mother had that morning sent Nubbs a photograph of her new baby at home. And Nubbs forgot the photograph and stuffed the mixture in upon it, and made a separate compartment for the stars on top. So the photograph of Nubby’s mother’s new baby, curiously enough, went off with the rocket, and was never more seen by mortal eye. Not that Nubbs cared. He kept the rocket till the Doctor’s birthday, and after prayers, when he knew he was in his study, with the windows open and the blinds up, being summer-time, Nubbs let it off in the front garden, and we helped. It turned out very good in a way, though not quite a perfect rocket, because instead of going up it tore along the ground. But it tore for an enormous distance, and then turned and came back all of itself. And the blue stars did not go off, but the yellow ones did--or some--in a bed of rather swagger geraniums, unfortunately.

The Doctor didn’t care much about it, not understanding our motives. But Nubbs explained that he had done it out of honor to the day. Then the Doctor thanked him, and said he had doubtless meant well, and that from the earliest times of the Chinese the pyrotechnist’s art had been employed upon occasions of legitimate festivity and rejoicing.

I mention this because it was the encouragement he had over this creeping rocket that made Nubbs get so above himself, if you understand me. He never forgot it, and next autumn term he actually asked the Doctor if he might have a regular firework display in the playground on the night of the Fifth of November. He asked rather cunningly, just after an English History lesson, during which the Doctor had been slating Guy Fawkes frightfully; and having said such a heap of hard things about the beggar, Doctor Dunston couldn’t very well refuse.

He said:

“Your request is unusual Tomkins; but I can see no objection at the moment. However, I will let you have my answer at no distant date.”

And I said to Nubbs:

“That means he’ll think and think till he’s got a reason why you shouldn’t, and let you know then.”

But Nubbs said to me:

“I believe he’ll let me do it, feeling so jolly bitter as he does about Guy Fawkes.”

And blessed if he didn’t! Nubbs undertook to make the things himself. Nothing was to be bought but chemicals in a raw, unmixed condition, and Doctor Dunston actually headed the subscription list with 2_s._ 6_d._; and Thompson gave the same, and Mannering 2_s._, and “Frenchy” 3_s._ Fifty-two chaps also contributed various sums from 1_s._ to 1_d._; and Nubbs became rather important, and went down gradually to the bottom of the Lower Fifth owing to the strain upon his mind.

He gathered together £2 7_s._ 5_d._ in all, and made it up to £2 10_s._ himself; and Fowle’s father, who was in some business where they used sulphur in terrific quantities, got four pounds weight of it for nothing, and Nubbs said it was a godsend for illuminating purposes. He had been to the Crystal Palace, and told us he was going to carry everything out just like they did there, as far as he could with the money. At the last moment he got a tremendous increase of funds in the shape of a pound from his father; and, strangely enough, it was that extra pound that wrecked him. Without that father’s pound he couldn’t have arranged the principal feature of the whole performance; and without that principal feature nothing in the way of misfortunes to Nubbs worth mentioning would have fallen out. But the pound came, and with it a letter very encouraging to Nubby.

He went on mixing away at the various proper compounds and experimenting with them till he got his rockets to go up like larks and his Roman candles to shoot out stars the length of a cricket pitch. Then his governor’s pound came, and he decided on having a set piece with it. A set piece, Nubby said, is the triumph of the firework maker’s art--and very likely it is in proper hands. You can have likenesses in fire, or words, or ships, or “Fame crowning Virtue,” or, in fact, pretty well anything. A set piece is designed small first, then large; and it is worked out with little tiny things like squibs, only very small and without any bang at the end. These are all lighted off at once, and they burn one color first, then change to another. Nubbs said his would start yellow, because it was cheaper, and finally turn green. The thing was what design to have, and the four chaps in the chemistry class all thought differently. I advised trying a shot at a huge portrait of the Doctor, but when it came to particulars nobody knew how to work a portrait; and Hodges thought we might do something about Guy Fawkes, but Nubbs didn’t care about that. Then Hodges thought again, and suggested the words, “God bless the Doctor,” and I agreed that it would be fine; but Wilson said it was profane, and might annoy the Doctor frightfully, especially when it turned green. Then Nubbs suggested the words, “Doctor Dunston is a Brick!” and Hodges said that it was good, and Wilson said it might be good, but it wasn’t true, anyway. However, it was three to one, though we all admitted that, from his point of view, Wilson was right to hate the Doctor, because the Doctor hates him.

The thing was to make a licking big frame of light wood, and arrange the letters across it, and the note of exclamation at the end. This we did, and hammered it against the playground wall, and wheeled up the screens that go behind the bowler’s arm in the cricket season, and hid away the set piece behind them till the time came. Likewise we arranged stakes for the Roman candles, and a board for the Catharine wheels, and a string for the flying pigeons, and so on. And also we rigged up bits of tin round the playground and by the fir-trees at the top end and behind the gym. These were for Bengal lights and other illuminations. All of this Nubbs had arranged for the paltry sum of £3 10_s._ The chemistry class had a half-holiday as the time drew on, and we worked like niggers, all four of us. Nubbs commanded, so to speak, and mixed and did the grinding and pounding and stars. Hodges and I hammered up the heavy posts and stakes in the playground, and carried out odd jobs generally; and Wilson manufactured cases for everything with brown paper and paste and string.

The set piece took two hundred and thirteen little tubes. These Wilson made in lengths of a yard and cut off at the required size. And Nubbs stuffed them--with green fire first and yellow on top. It promised to be a jolly big thing altogether, and four days before the night Nubbs began to get awfully nervous, and to prepare yards and yards of touch-paper.

And Corkey minimus heard the Doctor say to Browne:

“Really the lads have devoted no little energy and method on their proceedings; and it appears--so Mr. Stoddart tells me--that the boy Tomkins has mixed his compounds quite correctly, thereby insuring that brilliance and variety which is looked for in an exhibition of this kind. I wonder whether we might ask the parents and friends of those who dwell at Merivale and the immediate neighborhood.”

And Browne, who never misses a chance of showing the brute he is at heart, said:

“Really, I should think twice, Doctor Dunston. There is such an element of chance with amateur fireworks. Unfortunately, we can’t have a dress rehearsal, as with the scenes from Shakespeare and the recitations at the end of the term.”

“Nevertheless,” said the Doctor, “I am disposed to run the risk. A little harmless pleasure combined with courtesy to relatives at mid-term is rather desirable than not.”

So about fifty people were asked, and they brought fifty more, and the cads from Merivale got to know too, and there was a good crowd of them along the fence by the gym. Also two policemen came, and Nubbs, who was nervous before, grew much worse when he heard of it. Besides, we had a frightful shock two days before the firework night, owing to the loss of poor old Wilson. By simply sickening luck he got reported by Browne for cheek. It was when Browne came out in a new pair of awfully squeaking boots with sham pearl buttons at the side and drab tops; and Wilson said they were ugly “eighteens” and Browne heard him. The Doctor took an awfully grave view of this, and told Wilson that personality was the vilest kind of cheek. Which wouldn’t have mattered, but he gave him a thousand lines as well, and forbade him to see the fireworks or help any more with them.

“And that’s the man you call a brick!” Wilson said, rather bitterly. It certainly was rough, after the way he had worked; but from the Wing Dormitory, where he would be at the time, he might be able to see pretty well everything by leaning far out between the window bars. Which Nubbs pointed out to him, and he said he should. He also said he’d pay out Browne some day, and very likely Dunston too.

Well, the night came, and it was a fine one; and the cads likewise came and lined the fence. Then the Doctor clapped his hands twice, which was the signal to begin; and just as he did so out burst yellow fire everywhere behind the bits of tin, lighted simultaneously by seven chaps. And everybody seemed to like it; and the Doctor said:

“Capital! Bravo, Tomkins--a pleasing and fairy like conceit!”

Then Nubbs let fly two rockets, and they went up well and burst out in stars, though not as many by any means as we had crammed into them; but one twisted for some reason, and, instead of falling in the direction of the cads, the stick twinkled down, with just a spark of red here and there in the line of it, bang behind the chapel. Both Nubbs and I distinctly heard it go smack through the top of the greenhouse, and I rather think the Doctor heard it too, for he didn’t say “Bravo” or anything, but just sent a kid to tell Nubbs to point future rockets the other way, which disheartened Nubbs, because he’s like a girl at times of great excitement such as this was. But he soon cheered up, especially at the splendid success of the Catherine-wheels, which he hadn’t hoped much from, and at the cheers even the cads gave for the “golden rain” which showed up everything as bright as day, including Maude and the other Dunston girls, and Mrs. Dunston, and Nubby’s father standing smiling very amiably by the Doctor, and the policemen blinking, and the crowd, and a white dab hanging out of a high window afar off, which I saw and knew to be Wilson.

Only the balloon failed, owing to the nervousness of Nubbs, who set fire to the whole show while he was trying to light the spirit on the sponge underneath; but he passed it off with crackers thrown among the kids, and then, while they were all yelling, he dragged away the cricket screens, and Nubbs let off the set piece. He lighted the touch-paper, and it snapped and crackled all over the design in a moment, and a thick smoke rose, and out of it came the set piece flaring in rich yellow fire. Of course, we expected what Nubbs and Wilson had arranged, viz., “Doctor Dunston is a Brick!” but instead there came out these awful words:

“DOCTOR DUNSTON IS A BRUTE!”

That just shows what a frightful difference three letters will make in a thing; and the night was so dark and the letters so big that you could have read them a mile off. Only, if you will believe it, Dunston didn’t. People applauded like anything at first, till the preliminary smoke cleared off and they read the truth. Then they shut up and made a sound like wind coming through a wood. But the cads yelled and roared, and so did the policemen, for I heard them; and to make the frightful thing a shade more frightful, if possible, the Doctor, who is as blind as ten bats, and didn’t realize the end of the set piece, but only read his name at the top, clapped his hands and said: