PART I
BOYS
THE VAGARIES OF TOD AND PETER
I
THE MURDER
By the people who live in the same terrace they are known as “those dreadful twins.” By the more plain-spoken of the masters at the preparatory school which they attend they are distinguished by an adjective whose meaning is the reverse of “heavenly”; and their schoolfellows are filled with respectful admiration for the boys, the most resourcefully and superfluously naughty of their acquaintance, whose genius for making the most patient of masters lose his temper is unsurpassed.
The only person who takes them and their ways with calm philosophy is their mother. She, with that sense of proportion and balanced wisdom so frequently vouchsafed to mothers of large families, laughs and loves them, and believes in their ultimate regeneration. There is some ground for the faith that is in her; for when a woman has seen six sons fare forth into the world to cut no such indifferent figure in it, she is not apt to despair of the two youngest, roister they never so.
Moreover, she declares that most of their evil doings are “really Mr. Stevenson’s fault,” and there is truth in the charge, for from the moment that some thoughtless person, probably a godfather (I have known godfathers, living at a distance, who would present trumpets, nay, even concertinas! to the sons of men whom they have called by the name of friend), gave Peter a copy of “The Merry Men” and Tod “Treasure Island,” they have tried to fit their surroundings to the characters they are forever enacting; with the result that the plain workaday world, that knows not the “Master Mage” of Samoa, is always puzzled and generally wroth.
That genial “spirit of boyhood” had never so much as to beckon to them; he had but to hold out his friendly hands, and Tod and Peter, each clasping one in both their own, were his, body and soul, forevermore.
They are alike as the two Dromios, these twins; and the mistakes and complications arising from this likeness are a never-failing source of satisfaction to them. For instance, Peter will cheerfully undergo a caning intended for Tod that he may afterwards meekly demand of his chastener what he has done to deserve this discipline, gleefully watching the while the weary wonder on the master’s face grow to a disgusted certainty that he has, as usual, “punished the wrong one.”
The fact that they are rather noticeably comely boys--they came of a family where on both sides of the house good looks are the invariable rule--only serves to increase the confusion. Both are tall and straight, fair-haired, blue-eyed, ruddy, and of a uniformly cheerful countenance. But kind Nature has bestowed on Tod an accomplishment she has denied to Peter, to his lasting grief.
At certain seasons of the year Tod “moults” and can pull out quantities of his thick fair hair without the slightest inconvenience to himself. He generally chooses to perform this feat during the silent hours of “prep.” They have done their evening work at school ever since the night they were discovered grilling “Home Influence” and “A Mother’s Recompense” over the study fire, when they ought to have been wrestling with “Excerpta Facilia.” When the master in charge has walked down to the end of the long schoolroom where Tod “keeps,” and has turned to go back again, Tod is suddenly seized by a perfect paroxysm of despair, clutches at his hair with frantic though absolute noiseless gesticulations, and casts whole handfuls of fluffy curls on the floor about him.
Naturally his companions, including Peter, get lines for disturbing the placidity of “prep” with their unseemly giggles. And George, when he sweeps up the schoolroom next morning, may be heard to mutter:
“Wherever all this ’air do come from passes me!”
Tod’s real name is Percy--he is called after a wealthy and aristocratic relative--but he refuses point-blank to answer to it, for he fancies that it savours of those “eeny peeny” children in “Home Influence,” a work that earned their undying hatred when it was read aloud to them by a well-intentioned but mistaken aunt while they were recovering from measles.
On the occasion of its holocaust, before referred to, their mother, passing the study, and struck by the unwonted stillness reigning therein, opened the door softly and looked in. Both boys were stooping over the fireplace and prodding a solid yet feathery mass that glowed and gloomed in the heart of the embers.
“There goes Herbert, ‘the almost-angel boy,’ and ‘haughty Caroline,’ and ‘playful Emmiline,’” whispered Tod, poking viciously. While Peter, quoting from “Thrawn Janet,” added in an awful voice:
“_Witch, beldame, devil! I charge you, by the power of God, begone--if you be dead, to the grave--if you be damned, to hell._”
I regret to say that their mother’s sense of humor is stronger than her dislike of strong language, and that she stole away to laugh, leaving the conspirators unrebuked for the moment. But they did their “prep.” at school henceforth.
Peter’s manner is singularly misleading in its frank sincerity, and he will on occasion answer a sudden question in a way which is, to say the least of it, bewildering to his interlocutor.
For instance, one day in the football-field a new master asked him the name of a small boy some distance off who was “slacking” abominably.
“Who’s that chap with the red hair by the goal posts?” he said to Peter, who had been somewhat officiously putting him right on several points.
“Dumpkins, sir,” that youth replied, demurely, and strolled off to a distant part of the playground.
“Dumpkins!” bawled the master. “Dumpkins, why aren’t you playing up?”
But Dumpkins heeded not the voice of authority and continued to loll and gaze heavenward in easy inactivity.
“Dumpkins! Dump-kins!” again he bellowed.
But Dumpkins only took an apple out of his pocket and began to eat it.
He is a hasty-tempered young man that master, and he strode toward the hapless Dumpkins and shook him angrily, exclaiming:
“Why don’t you answer when I call, you cheeky little beggar?”
“Please, sir, you never called me, sir,” expostulated the boy, wriggling in the master’s grip.
“Why, I’ve been shouting ‘Dumpkins’ all over the field for the last five minutes!”
“But, please sir, my name is Jones!”
* * * * *
“Why did you tell me Jones’s name was Dumpkins, you, Peter?” the master indignantly demanded of Tod some minutes later.
“I couldn’t have done that, sir,” said Tod, gravely, “for there’s nobody called Dumpkins in the school.”
It was this young master who rechristened the twins when Peter next day insisted that “a point has position but no gratitude.”
Strangely enough “The Merry Men” finds even greater favor with them than “Treasure Island,” and with the enigmatical decision of childhood their favorite of all the stories is “Markheim,” not “Will o’ the Mill,” beloved of critics. It is doubtful if they understand much of it, but nevertheless they read it over and over again to each other aloud, or silently with their curly heads pressed together, till they knew it by heart. To be sure, “Thrawn Janet” has a dreadful fascination for them, and they acted one of the principal scenes with somewhat direful results.
Peter made Tod “tie him by the neck” to the bed with red worsted, while Tod, in his character of the minister, had to creep in, candle in hand, to discover the dread spectacle; and Peter’s representation of the fearsome Janet was so truthful and blood-curdling that Tod dropped the candle and fled downstairs howling at the top of his voice, and such was his haste that he fell and sprained his wrist. Meanwhile, the candle had set fire to the valance of the bed, and altogether there was a fine hullabaloo; there was also an end put to their dramatic efforts for a week or two.
Nothing daunted, however, about a month later, on a Sunday evening when the servants were all at church, and their mother writing for dear life the long weekly letters that have to be written when a woman has husband and four sons scattered about the globe, Tod and Peter sought the seclusion of the kitchen and determined to “act” “Markheim.”
All went well and quietly for a long time; the firelit kitchen with loud ticking clock answered admirably as the scene of the murder, the dialogue between Markheim and the mysterious stranger went without a hitch, and Tod sallied forth into a “wonderful clear night of stars,” while Peter shut the back door softly after him. Peter, in his character of Markheim, was bent upon making the speech with which the story concludes, where the maidservant rings the door-bell and Markheim opens to her with the words: “You had better go for the police; I have killed your master!”
Poor Tod had to be the maidservant--he always had to follow where Peter led. He shivered as he ran up the area steps; it was a cold night, he had not troubled to provide himself with a coat, and his heart was heavy, for, to tell the truth, he has far more imagination than Peter, and sometimes their plays are to him one long agony of apprehension.
He positively dreaded ringing that area bell, and the sinister announcement that would follow on the act. No longer was he Tod, but a trembling servant lass who was forced by fate to ring a bell which sounded a tocsin of dreadful import.
He ran down to the end of the terrace and stood under a lamp that he might brace himself for the final effort.
Meanwhile, Peter, swollen with importance at the thought of the mighty sensation he would make in a minute or two, stood squeezed against the hinge of the door waiting for the fateful ring.
Then came a patter of light feet down the area steps and someone gave the bell a modest pull. Peter drew open the door with great suddenness upon himself, exclaiming in a deep and tragic voice, the result of long practice in solitary attics:
“_You had better go for the police; I have killed your master!_”
The visitor gave a piercing shriek and rushed up the steps again, calling breathlessly upon Heaven and the police. Peter, behind the door, wagged his head, exclaiming admiratively:
“How well that kid does act; I could almost declare I heard skirts rustling.”
Peter waited awhile for his brother to return and be congratulated, but Tod didn’t appear, so he concluded that he had gone round to the front door and come in that way; besides, the servants were just due from church, and cook would be cross if she found him in her domain. He ran upstairs and waited for his twin in the drawing-room. His mother looked up from her letters and smiled at the little figure tip-toeing on the hearth-rug to admire himself in the glass. Then scratch, scratch went her pen again.
Now, Ada, the housemaid, has a dear friend in service at the other end of the terrace, and she attends a church where the sermons are shorter than those at the one frequented by Peter’s household. On this particular Sunday she got out of church quite early and thought she would see whether Ada happened to be in. Thus, while Tod with lagging feet crept slowly down the terrace from one end, she was already fleeing affrightedly to the other in search of the nearest policeman.
She found him at the pillar-box, and fell into his stalwart arms, crying hysterically:
“Oh, come quick! There’s bin murder done at Number 9. Someone’s bin an’ killed the marster!”
P.C. Lee turned the light of his bull’s-eye upon Ada’s friend and found her fair to look upon. All the same, although he still supported her trembling frame, he shook his head slowly, saying:
“’E ain’t there for to be murdered; the Colonel’s bin in Hinjia this las’ ten weeks; the missis tol’ me so ’erself, when she ast me to keep a special heye to them premises.”
All the same, in spite of his incredulity, P.C. Lee was already on his way to Number 9, half leading, half carrying Ada’s friend with him.
“But I tell you,” persisted the girl, “when I ring that there bell, the door opened sudden-like as if someone was be’ind it, and a hawful voice says to me, ‘You’d better go for the perlice,’ it says, ‘I’ve killed your master,’ and I was that taken to, I did go for you, Mr. Lee, as fast as I could lay foot to the ground. It may be as one of the young gentlemen’s bin murdered, ’is pa bein’, so to speak, abroad. It give me such a turn----”
And Ada’s friend was forced to stop in the middle of the road, overcome by the horrid recollection.
“But didn’t you see no one?” asked P.C. Lee, in a judicial voice.
“No, trust me, I didn’t wait to _see_ nothing; I’d ’eard enough without that. I’ll wait out ’ere,” she continued as they reached the scene of the tragedy, “on the top of the steps. I couldn’t abear to see no dead bodies;” and Ada’s friend disengaged herself from the policeman’s protecting clasp and clung to the area railings for support, exclaiming afresh: “I’d never get over it--never!”
“But you must come in and give evidence wot you did ’ear,” expostulated P.C. Lee. “I don’t believe myself as anything criminal ’as occurred; but I’ll just ring and ast.”
“I’d take my dyin’ oath them was the very words that murderer says to me,” cried Ada’s friend, jibbing on the top step as the minion of the law put forth a large hand to assist her down. “‘I’ve killed your master,’ says ’e, despairin’ like, as if it was no use to try an’ ’ide it.”
P.C. Lee proceeded to perform a solo on the bell very different to the two timid tintinnabulations that had preceded it during the last ten minutes; for while Ada’s friend sought the protection of the strong arm of the law, poor little Tod had screwed his courage to the sticking-point, gone back and rung the area bell, when, to his unspeakable relief, he was admitted by cook, just returned from church in so benign a humor that she forebore to scold him for being out at such untoward hours “without so much as a ’at,” and bestowed a piece of bread and dripping upon him “to stop ’is teeth a-chatterin’.”
Whereupon, comforted and refreshed, he departed to find Peter.
Meanwhile P.C. Lee insisted that he must see the missis, for Ada’s friend was unshaken in her evidence, question they never so, and the four maids at Number 9 declared that they could not sleep comfortably in their beds unless the search-light of his bull’s-eye was thrown on every dusky corner of the house by P.C. Lee himself before he took his departure.
Ada’s friend was seated weeping in the front hall surrounded by the others, when the mistress, fetched by Ada herself, and accompanied by Tod and Peter, descended to hold parley with P.C. Lee.
“I can’t understand it, ma’am,” concluded the policeman, after a long explanation, continually interrupted by Ada’s friend with such interpolations as: “Oh, a hawful voice, that mournful”--“Them was the very words,” etc.
During this recital Tod and Peter crept further and further into the background, nudging each other in the ecstasy occasioned by such an unexpected tribute to their histrionic powers.
But their mother knows her Stevenson--and the twins--so before the narrative was nearly finished she turned swiftly upon them, demanding sternly:
“Which of you was it?”
* * * * *
“Young varmints!” said P.C. Lee to Ada’s friend, as he escorted her home; “I might ’a’ knowed it was them. ’Tain’t the fust time I’ve come across ’em, neither....”
II
THE SENDING
When the time came for those twins, Tod and Peter, to go to public school, their mother seriously considered the advisability of putting them into different “houses.” At first she thought that, perhaps, it might make for righteousness to separate them. But on hearing the subject mooted, they so whole-heartedly fell in with her opinion, rapturously reviewing the possibility of “changing houses” whenever they felt so inclined, that she instantly dismissed the idea; rightly coming to the conclusion that if their extraordinary resemblance was a cause of general muddle and mystification while they were together, it would become confusion worse confounded were they separated. Moreover, she reflected that even schoolmasters are men of like passions with ourselves, and rightly refrained from adding to such a one’s already heavy burden by a separate superintendence of the twins.
Tod and Peter, whose mental attitude was always that “all is for the best in the best possible of worlds,” decided that after all propinquity has its advantages, and rejoiced that family tradition sent them into a house whose head was proverbially the “slackest old slackster in the whole school.” A dreamy, mild-mannered, gentlemanly man that master, who left the management of the “house” entirely to an extremely energetic wife and a “young brusher” (“brusher” is the familiar term for master in that school), whose prowess in the playing-fields was only equalled by his extreme fussiness where rules of his own making were concerned.
“Not a bad chap,” the twins decided after their first week; “but a bit like the German Emperor, you know--wants things all his own way. Still, if you humor the youth, he’s all right.”
So successfully did they humor the “young brusher” in question that for the first month all went smoothly, and the house-master himself, a gentle optimist, ever ready to believe the best of boy-humanity, really thought that the “character” that had preceded them from preparatory school was perhaps over-emphasized.
Their late headmaster, while giving them full credit for general integrity and fair abilities, had, in mercy to his brethren of the craft, pointed out that they were ever “ready to join in frivolity and insubordination, when not under my own eye.” They had to work, for they were on the Modern Side, and destined for the army, and in that particular school, not the wiliest shirker in creation can escape the argus eye of the “head of the Modern,” or the retribution, swift, sharp, and sure, that follows any such line of conduct.
But, bless you! ordinary work and games, at which both were good, never found sufficient scope for the energies of Tod and Peter, and by the time the first month was up they began their tricks.
One Mr. Neatby, M.A., taught the twins chemistry. Not that they went to him together. They were in different, though, as far as work went, parallel forms, and finding that their systematic “changing” was never so much as suspected, and therefore carried with it no spice of danger or adventure, they gave it up, devoting their energies to the tormenting of Mr. Neatby, who had by his severity incurred their august displeasure.
Mr. Neatby was tall, severe, and dignified. He really liked his subject, but felt, as a rule, little affection for his pupils. Nevertheless, he was conscientious to the last degree in the discharge of his duties. His way of expressing himself was what Peter called “essayish”; he gave lines lavishly, and had but little mercy on the reckless breaker of test-tubes. He did not rant, or stamp, or call people by opprobrious names, as did many better loved masters. He was always cold, cutting, and superior. But the thing about him that most excited Peter’s animosity was his necktie.
“He wears revolting, jerry-built, Judas-like ties,” the indignant Peter proclaimed to an admiring audience of lower boys; “ties that slip down and show a beastly, brassy stud. His socks, too, leave much to be desired; in fact, his extremities altogether are such as betoken a bad, hard heart.”
“Let me see,” said Tod softly, looking up from a book he was reading; “do you think that a _sending_ might soften the man’s hard heart?”
At this particular stage of the twins’ career, Mr. Kipling was the God of their idolatry, and both of them had “gloated,” even in the manner of the immortal “Stalky” himself, over the vengeance of Ram Das.
“It might be managed,” Peter answered, thoughtfully scratching his smooth chin; “but then again, it may be close-time for kittens just at present; don’t they generally bloom in the spring?”
“There’s always plenty of kittens, you juggins,” ejaculated a prosaic friend. “Why, when I was down at the riding school this morning, there was a cat with six in an empty loose-box; they’ll have to drown five of ’em, they told me. D’your people want one or what?”
“_I_ want one,” Peter rejoined excitedly; “not one, but five, to give to a dear friend.”
“Shouldn’t think he’d be your dear friend long.”
“Oh, yes, he will. He’s an S.P.C.K., or whatever it is. He’s awfully profane--humane, I mean.”
“Well,” said the other boy, still unconvinced; “you can ask about ’em when you go for your lesson to-morrow morning. They weren’t half bad little beasts, but I shouldn’t advise you to give your friend more than one at a time, anyhow.”
Both Tod and Peter went twice a week to the riding school in the town, as they were both destined for cavalry. Every underling about the place knew them well, and liked them. Their father had lived in the town during his last leave, jobbed his horses at the riding-master’s stables, and had himself assisted at the lessons of elder brothers of Tod and Peter.
Now there was at the school a certain Figgins, a generally handy man, or rather boy, who worshipped the ground the twins walked upon; and after their next lesson they and Figgins might have been seen holding long and earnest parley in the loose-box containing the cat and kittens.
The twins laughed uproariously all the way home, and just as they reached the house, Peter remarked: “I hate anything dead. Figgins has promised not one of ’em shall be drowned, and when they’re fit to be moved, he’ll tell old White he’s found good homes for the lot. And then--and then Tod, my boy! our dear teacher shall have ’em alive, ‘alive, all alive oh! alive, all alive oh!’” and Peter burst into song in the exuberance of his joy.
Mr. Neatby lived in lodgings within a convenient distance of the school. He was therefore spared any intercourse with the boys after school hours, and usually spent his evenings in correcting innumerable marble-boarded exercise books, containing chemistry notes. He was so engaged one evening about nine o’clock, when his landlady entered the room and laid a square parcel at his elbow.
He finished correcting the book he had in hand, and took another, when his attention was arrested by an indescribable sound.
Mr. Neatby lifted his head and gazed about the room. “Could it be a mouse under the skirting-board?” he wondered. Then half unconsciously his eyes fell on the parcel his landlady had brought into the room. It was an oblong cardboard box, about the size of an ordinary shoe-box. But, although tied up with string, it was not wrapped in paper, and on looking at it more closely, Mr. Neatby discovered that the top was riddled with small holes.
Had it been summer, he, being something of a naturalist, would have at once concluded that someone had sent him some rare caterpillars, but what caterpillars are to be found in November?
He drew the parcel toward him, and there arose that curious sound again, louder and more insistent. He hastily cut the string and removed the lid of the box, and inside, reposing on a nest of hay, lay a very young and mewey kitten. A kitten who most evidently was homesick and aggrieved at being reft from the maternal bosom. A sprawly, squirmy, noisy kitten, that immediately proceeded to climb out of the box and crawl uncertainly to Mr. Neatby’s blotting-pad, where it collapsed into a dismal little heap, mewing louder than ever.
“There must be some mistake,” muttered Mr. Neatby, flushed and perturbed. “No one would send _me_ a kitten; that stupid woman must have made some muddle or other,” and he arose hastily and rang the bell.
He so rarely rang his bell after his modest supper had been cleared away that Mrs. Vyner, his landlady, had given up expecting him to do so, and had on this occasion “just stepped out,” as she would have put it, to see a neighbor.
Mr. Neatby rang, and rang in vain, finally so far departing from his decorously distant demeanor as to go to the top of the kitchen stairs and shout. But the faint mewing of the kitten was the only answer to his outcries, and baffled and annoyed he returned to his sitting-room to find that the kitten had upset the red ink over Tod’s chemistry notes, which, in company with many others, lay open on the table, and was feebly attempting to lap it up.
“Poor little thing; it’s hungry,” he thought to himself. And being, indeed, as Peter said, a very humane man, he lifted it from the table, and went to his sideboard to see if he could find any milk. He did find some in the cupboard underneath where it had no business to be, and pouring some into a saucer, laid it on the floor beside the kitten, who proceeded to refresh itself with commendable promptitude.
Then, as his landlady still made no appearance, Mr. Neatby bethought him of looking at the parcel to see whether the kitten had been left at the wrong house. But no; attached to the string was a label, clearly addressed in a flowing, clerkly hand, “S. S. Neatby, Esq., M.A.,” followed by his address, accurate as to number, street, and even town.
Once more he sat down in his chair, and leant his head on his hand to think, when he perceived, tucked into the hay at one side of the box, a card, and drew it forth hastily; a plain glazed visiting card on which was inscribed the words, “From a grateful friend,” in the same excellent handwriting as the label.
Mr. Neatby blushed, and looked guiltily at the happily supping kitten. In addition to being humane, Mr. Neatby was also charitable, and there were many poor who had reason to be grateful to him. But as he always gave alms through a third person, and was one of those modest people who take care that their left hand knows not what the right hand doeth, he felt quite upset.
Presently he heard his landlady and her niece come in, and rang again.
“Who brought this box, Mrs. Vyner?” he asked, holding it up toward her.
“I can’t say, sir, I’m sure. It was dark when I answered the door, and a young man--leastways, I think ’e was young--simply give it into my ’ands and ran down the steps again. I ’eld it under the gas in the ’all, sir, and read the label, as it was for you right enough, so I brings it in and lays it down without never interruptin’ you, sir, like you said.”
“_There was a kitten in that box_,” Mr. Neatby said solemnly, in such a tone as might have announced some national calamity.
“Sakes alive! you don’t say so, sir,” cried Mrs. Vyner in great excitement; “shall you keep it, sir?”
“I don’t know yet,” Mr. Neatby said gravely; “it must stay here for to-night anyway.”
“It’s a pretty little thing, sir,” said the landlady, stooping down to look at it where it lay basking in the heat of the fire. “’Twould be company for you, wouldn’t it, sir?”
“Hadn’t it better go with you to the kitchen for to-night, Mrs. Vyner?” Mr. Neatby asked persuasively, and Mrs. Vyner, with many protestations of wonder, gathered up the kitten into her apron and departed to the lower regions, where she informed the niece who lived with her that their lodger “’adn’t spoken so many words to ’er never before, no, not in a month of Sundays.”
Mr. Neatby threw the box into his capacious waste-paper basket, but he put the card and label carefully away in one of the pigeon-holes of his desk.
Next day, on his return from morning school, he found a white cardboard hat-box, big enough to contain the most umbrageous matinée hat ever worn, set right in the middle of his table, and he felt distinctly annoyed. His landlady followed him into the sitting-room to lay lunch, and he, pointing to the offending box, said coldly: “I must ask you not to leave your parcels in my room, Mrs. Vyner.”
Mrs. Vyner bridled, and seizing the box, held it out toward him, remarking aggrievedly: “If so be as you refers to this ’ere, sir, I must ast you to look ’oo it’s addressed to. It’s put plain enough for you, sir.”
“But I assure you,” Mr. Neatby cried, recoiling from the proffered hat-box, “that I haven’t ordered a hat of any kind.”
“Any’ow,” said Mrs. Vyner scornfully, “I don’t suppose, sir, as you’d order your ’ats from Madame Looeese, if you ’ad. I thought per’aps you’d bought a present for your young lady.”
“Mrs. Vyner,” replied Mr. Neatby, in a voice glacial as liquid air itself, “you forget yourself.”
Mrs. Vyner set down the box with an angry thump, and proceeded to lay the cloth in injured silence.
When she had gone, Mr. Neatby approached the mysterious package delicately, much as though it had been an infernal machine of some sort, and regarded it searchingly on all sides. It most certainly emanated from the millinery establishment of “Madame Louise,” but was none the less certainly addressed in sprawly, feminine handwriting to “S. S. Neatby, Esq., M.A.”
Just then Mrs. Vyner opened the door, saying waspishly, “’Ere’s your kitting, sir; it keeps getting under my feet while I’m dishin’ up.”
It seemed to have gained considerable vigor during the night, for it rushed across the room and up the curtain.
But Mr. Neatby had screwed his courage to the sticking-place, and even the tempestuous entry of the kitten could not turn him from his purpose. Penknife in hand, he cut the string of the bonnet-box, and lifted the lid timidly, prepared no doubt for some tissue-paper protected “confection” within. When, lo! even as that of the shoe-box on the previous night was this interior; hay, dry and fragrant of stable, met his astonished gaze, while seated in its midst was a tabby kitten, who gathered herself together for a spring the instant the lid was lifted, and sprang with such good-will as to turn the box over on its side, when she immediately dashed under the table.
Mr. Neatby gazed, as if hypnotized, at the tumbled box, till the rattling of dishes outside warned him of the near approach of his landlady with lunch, and roused him from his trance.
He stooped hastily, thrust the scattered hay into the band-box, clapped on the lid, and placed it under the knee-hole of his writing-table.
The door was opened rather suddenly to admit Mrs. Vyner; kitten number one descended from the curtain, and Mr. Neatby found himself almost praying that kitten number two would stay under the table while his landlady was in the room. Mrs. Vyner glanced disdainfully in the direction of the band-box, noted that the string had been cut, set the dishes on the table with somewhat unnecessary violence, and departed without having opened her lips, just as the two kittens frisked out from beneath the table.
Mr. Neatby, harrassed and flushed “all over his eminent forehead,” did not begin his lunch. He went back to the band-box again, studied the label anew, and finally rummaged in the hay inside.
His search was rewarded by the discovery of a rather dirty piece of paper, on which was written “A Present from Framilode,” Framilode being a village in the neighborhood, celebrated for the manufacture of a certain kind of mug which always bore that legend. He put it carefully beside the other card and label in his desk, and returned to his lunch with but small appetite, and a frown of perplexity upon his brow. The kittens set up a perfect chorus of mewing; Mr. Neatby braced himself to explain the new arrival to Mrs. Vyner, and rang for the pudding.
* * * * *
“It’s my belief, sir,” said Mrs. Vyner that evening, “that somebody’s a puttin’ a ’oaf upon you. I sent my niece to that there Madame Looeese’s with the box lid, an’ she see madame ’erself, and _she_ says as it’s a hold box, an’ that they certainly never sent you no box, nor wouldn’t think of such a liberty, and you one of the school gentlemen and all. But my niece, she said as madame did laugh when she ’eard about the kitten, and ’er young ladies, too.”
Mr. Neatby writhed.
To a man of his reserved and sensitive temperament, the reflection that his name could by any possibility be bandied about by a milliner and her assistants was little short of maddening. If he could then and there have ordered Mrs. Vyner “to take five hundred lines,” it might have given him some relief. But in all things he was a just man, and he knew that his landlady had at all events meant kindly in trying to discover the perpetrator of the outrage; for the fact remained that somebody had most assuredly “put a ’oax” on him in the shape of the liveliest of tabby kittens.
It never occurred to him to suspect any of the boys. For how could one of them come by either band-box or kittens? To be sure there were some day boys, but it happened that these were nearly all “on the Classical,” and Mr. Neatby had but little to do with them.
Of course he reckoned without the ubiquitous Figgins, who, unlike Mr. Neatby, _had_ a young lady, who was employed by Madame Louise, and for whom it was an easy matter both to procure a disused band-box and a new label.
“You’re certain he got them all right?” whispered Peter to Figgins at his next lesson, as that worthy rushed forward officiously to settle the sack on the horse’s back. “He gave me back my notes simply smothered in red ink, and I thought I saw a mark like a kitten’s paw, but I couldn’t be sure.”
“Law bless you! yes, sir, _’e_ got ’em right enough. I took ’em myself, and wot’s more, both of ’em’s there still, for I passed by this mornin’ and ’appened to look down the airey, and there they both was as peart as print. I s’pose we’d better wait a day or so for the next ’un, ’adn’t us?”
“Yes, Figgins, wait two days till you see me again,” and Peter dug his knees into his horse and rode at the first jump.
“It’s rather decent of him to _keep_ them,” thought Peter to himself, who was tender-hearted where animals were concerned. “Perhaps, if he doesn’t clap on any more lines for a bit, I’ll let him off with two.”
But, alas for good intentions. When Peter got back to the house, he found Tod bursting with indignation. For at “Practical Chemistry,” that very morning, Tod, who was supposed to be engaged in the manufacture of hydrogen, used so many conflicting ingredients as to cause an explosion and dense smoke, and a smell so appalling that it drove the whole class into the corridor, and caused several testy masters to send indignant messages demanding where the infernal smell came from.
Mr. Neatby, exasperated to the last degree, not only told Tod to take five hundred lines, but bade him return the very next half-holiday and spend the afternoon in doing similar experiments under his master’s supervision.
Tod confided his grievance to Peter at great length, and concluded his recital with the injunction, “Let him have all three, the _beast_! I wish they were young gorillas.”
* * * * *
Mr. Neatby was very busy. He was taking extra duty for a master who was ill, and for three or four days after the arrival of the second kitten really had not a moment to call his own, so, as Mrs. Vyner seemed to take quite kindly to the new arrivals--only taking care to charge her lodger an extra quart of milk daily for their maintenance--he almost forgot their existence.
By Saturday evening he had accumulated a mass of mid-term examination work to correct, and directly after supper set himself down to it, with four clear hours before him, for he often worked till after midnight.
His lamp was trimmed, his fire burned brightly, and one kitten, the first, sat purring on the hearth. That, and the scratching of Mr. Neatby’s pen as he corrected the generally mistaken views of boys as to the nature of an element, were the only sounds till there came a thunderous rap outside, and the door-bell pealed loudly.
Mr. Neatby frowned, but never looked up from his corrections. He had not been long at the school, and was not upon intimate terms with any of the masters, so that it was hardly likely to be a caller for him. He heard somebody open the front door, then some vehicle drive away. A moment later there was a knock at his door, and Jemima, Mrs. Vyner’s niece, came in, bearing a hamper.
“Please, sir, this ’ave just come by rail; there wasn’t nothing to pay.”
“Very well,” Mr. Neatby answered without looking up; “put it down, please; I can’t attend to it just now.”
Jemima did as she was told, and once more silence settled upon the room.
But not for long. Kitten number one got restless; it walked round and round the hamper, and sniffed and mewed, and mewed and sniffed, with irritating persistency. Moreover, a curious muffled echo seemed to accompany its mewing. Mr. Neatby bore it for five minutes, then pushed back his chair, caught the disturbing kitten by the scruff of its neck, and bore it to the top of the kitchen stairs, calling to Jemima to take it down. That young lady obeyed his summons, taking the kitten tenderly into her arms with many endearments; but all the same she remarked to her aunt, “Well, I do think as ’e might manage to look after _one_ on ’em ’isself, that I do.”
Mr. Neatby went back to his papers and corrected with more vigor than before; but, in spite of his haste, in spite of his absorption, the muffled mewing continued.
At last he laid down his pen and listened. “Surely,” he thought, “it can’t sound like that from downstairs. I must have got the sound on my nerves; it’s really most annoying.” It _was_ annoying; it grew louder and louder till it seemed at his very side.
Mr. Neatby was endowed with great powers, both of self-control and concentration. Having decided that the sound was in his imagination, and not actual, he went on with the paper that he was correcting, but as he placed it on the top of the growing pile he chanced to notice the hamper which was placed on the hearth-rug close beside him. “Apples, I suppose, from home,” he thought to himself; “but all the same, I’d better see.” He lifted it on to his knee. “Too light for apples,” he thought again. “What can they have sent?”
The lid was not very tightly fastened, and a slash or two of the penknife at the string restraining it brought it away.
Hay, and again hay, in this case forming the cosy nest of _two_ kittens, one tortoiseshell and one black. Both lively and vociferous beyond either of their predecessors. Mr. Neatby ejaculated just one word, and sat perfectly still with the open hamper on his knee. The kittens climbed out and made hay among his papers, but he took no notice. “An angry man was he,” and when a man of his temperament is angry, he usually sits tight. The kittens got tired of the table, and jumped lightly to the floor, carrying a few dozen papers with them in their flight, but still Mr. Neatby sat on staring into space.
When at last he roused himself, he once more sought some solution of the mystery in the address label, but the yellow railway label on the back had been torn away, and only “ton” remained. The address itself was printed very neatly by hand.
Inside the hamper he found a little pink envelope with nicked edges such as servants love. He opened it, and printed by the same hand, on a piece of paper to match, was the following verse:
The kitten’s a persistent beast, It comes when you expect it least, It comes in ones, it comes in twos-- And when it comes it always mews.
“Ah!” Mr. Neatby said softly to himself, “some boy is at the bottom of this.”
The clock struck twelve, and he remembered with a start that both his landlady and Jemima would certainly be in bed.
What was to be done with the kittens?
He was far too kind-hearted to turn them out of doors on a cold November night. They were really uncommonly pretty little beasts, and as he watched their gambles he found himself quoting:
Alas! regardless of their doom, The little victims play,
and then realized that they had no business to be playing at all at that time of night, and that he certainly wanted to go to bed.
He really was a much tried man that night. First, he had to catch the kittens and put them in the hamper, and as fast as he put one in, the other jumped out. This took some time. Then he carried the hamper up to bed with him, the kittens making frantic efforts to escape the while. And when at last he did get to bed, he had to get up again to let them out of the hamper, for they made such a frightful din no mortal could sleep. They finally elected to settle down on Mr. Neatby’s bed, and in the morning one of them ungratefully scratched his nose because he happened to move when the kitten in question chose to walk over his face.
When at last he arose from very broken slumbers, the black kitten upset the shaving water and scalded its foot, and made a dreadful uproar, and the tortoiseshell, while investigating the mantelpiece, upset and threw into the grate a blue vase belonging to Mrs. Vyner.
In chapel on Sunday morning, Tod and Peter noted gleefully the long scratch on “old Stinks’” nose (“Stinks” being, I regret to say, the name by which Mr. Neatby was known among his pupils). And curiosity as to how he was getting on with his rapidly increasing family of cats consumed them. In the afternoon they walked up and down the road outside his lodgings for nearly an hour, but nothing did they discover; for Mrs. Vyner’s windows were shrouded by white curtains, no one went in or out of the house, and all their loitering was not rewarded by so much as hearing a distant mew.
The fact was that Mr. Neatby had gone for a long walk to try and work off his irritation. That morning, while he was still at breakfast, Mrs. Vyner had appeared in his sitting-room, and somewhat stormily informed him that her “’ouse was not a ’ome for lost cats, nor never ’ad been.” And she concluded her harangue as follows:
“I’ve ’ad gentlemen, masters at the school, for twelve year come Michaelmas, and some ’ave bin trouble enough, the Lard knows. With their football and ’ockey, and ’ot baths in the middle of the afternoon, and the mud on their flannings something hawful; but a gentleman as surrounded ’imself with cats in sech numbers I never ’ave ’ad nor never won’t again, I ’opes and prays. And although it do go again my conscience to do it of a Sunday, I _must_ ast you, sir, to take a week’s notice from yesterday. For start a fresh week with sech goin’s on, and cats a comin’ by every post as it were, I can’t; no, not if the king ’imself was to ast me on ’is bended knees.”
In vain poor Mr. Neatby pointed out that, far from “surrounding himself” with kittens, they were thrust upon him he knew not by whom or from whence. That he had no intention of keeping any of them if Mrs. Vyner objected, and that it would really be extremely inconvenient for him to have to seek new rooms in the middle of the term.
Mrs. Vyner was implacable. “I’m very upset about it, too, sir,” she answered, more in sorrow than in anger; “for I did think as ’ow I’d got a nice quiet gentleman, you not bein’ given to them ’orrid games as is so dirty, nor wantin’ an over amount of cookin’. But a gentleman as ’eaven appears to rain cats on like it do on you is not for the likes of me nor shan’t be. And though I’m truly sorry as you should be so afflicted, I must ast you to leave my ’ouse, sir, next Saturday as ever is, and that’s my last word.”
It wasn’t, not by a long way; for although Mr. Neatby reasoned, nay, even almost implored Mrs. Vyner to reconsider her decision, she would hardly let him get a word in edgeways, and remained unshaken in her desire that he should vacate her rooms. “’Ow do I know, sir,” she asked again and again, “wot hanimals may be sent you next? My ’eart would be in my mouth every time the door-bell rang.”
Truly, Tod and Peter had planned a fearful vengeance had they only known it. But they did not know it, and their unsatisfied curiosity was their undoing. On Monday morning at the riding school they arranged with Figgins that he was to leave the fifth kitten at Mr. Neatby’s rooms that afternoon, just before afternoon school finished. The despatch of the hamper had been managed by a railway man, a friend of Figgins, whose cart started from a parcel-receiving office close to the riding school, and he delivered the hamper on his evening round.
Directly school came out, the twins decided to rush down to Mr. Neatby’s rooms before lock-up, to ask some frivolous question about a paper he had set, and perhaps by great good luck be present at the unveiling of the end of the sending. All fell out exactly as they had arranged. Figgins took the parcel. Mrs. Vyner received it, addressed as before to “S. S. Neatby, Esq., M.A.” (his real name was “Stuart,” not “Stinks”), carried it grimly into his sitting-room, and laid it on the table. She removed all her own ornaments from the chimneypiece and sideboard, and then went downstairs and brought up all four kittens (poor Mr. Neatby had not yet had time to arrange for their painless destruction), and shut them up in the room to await their owner’s return.
At ten minutes past five he hastened in, trod on one of the kittens as he entered the room, and struck a match to light his lamp. The kitten noisily proclaimed its injury, and the other three expressed their sympathy in similar terms. When he caught sight of the brown-paper parcel on the table he turned pale. The very feel of it was enough, and even before he had torn off the cover he was sure of its contents. Yes, in a common little bird cage was a fat, white kitten, and an uncommonly tight fit she was.
He did not attempt to let her out, though her position was plainly one of extreme discomfort, but stood with the cage in his hands, and the four mewing kittens about his feet, in so universally distrustful a frame of mind that he began to think that Mrs. Vyner herself was in the plot to victimize him.
The door was opened, and his landlady’s voice announced: “Two young gentlemen to see you, sir.”
Fresh colored and handsome, ruddy from their run in the cold evening air, square-shouldered and upstanding, Tod and Peter allowed their two pairs of candid blue eyes to travel from their master’s angry face to his hands, from his hands holding the caged kitten to his feet, where congregated the rest of the sending, and then exclaimed in a chorus of genial astonishment: “Why, sir, what a lot of kittens you keep!”
Now, although he had been at the school three terms, no boy had ever ventured to call upon Mr. Neatby before. Other masters might occasionally ask boys to tea or permit an occasional call out of school hours to arrange about house matches, etc. But he had ever discouraged any familiarity whatsoever, and that Tod and Peter should dare to intrude upon him at such a moment seemed to him, as indeed it was, a piece of unparalleled impertinence.
“What do you want here?” he asked angrily. “It’s after lock-up.”
“Mr. Ord gave us leave to come,” Peter said eagerly. “We don’t understand this question, sir. Could you explain? What a noise those kittens do make, don’t they?”
Now if Tod could only have refrained from looking at Peter, Mr. Neatby might have remained forever in the dark as to the mystery of the kittens. But, even as Peter spoke, Tod, unaware that the light from the master’s lamp shone full on his face, winked delightedly at his brother, and in a flash Mr. Neatby connected their unexpected and unnecessary visit with those equally unwelcome visitants whose advent during the past week had entailed so much annoyance upon him.
Taking no notice of the paper Peter held out toward him, he laid the little cage on the table, and said very quietly:
“Now that you are here, you will perhaps kindly explain what you mean by sending all these animals to me.”
“Us, sir!” the twins exclaimed breathlessly, and as usual in chorus--“Us!”
“Did you or did you not cause these five kittens to be sent to me?” Mr. Neatby asked again.
Dead silence.
As Tod said afterward, “It was one of those beastly yes or no questions that there’s no getting out of.”
“Did you or did you not?” Mr. Neatby asked again, a little louder than before, though even the kittens had ceased mewing and seemed to be listening. “But I know you did, and I wish to know further what you mean by a piece of such intolerable impertinence, and such wanton defiance of school rules.”
“There’s no rule about sending kittens, sir,” murmured Peter, with the least suspicion of a giggle in his voice.
That giggle broke down the last barrier of Mr. Neatby’s self-control. For full five minutes he permitted himself to thunder at those boys, finally bidding them take all five kittens away with them there and then.
“But we can’t, sir; we _can’t_ take them back to the house,” pleaded Tod. “Whatever would Mrs. Ord say?”
“Well, you must take them away from here, anyway, and what’s more, you must give up the names of your confederates, that I may take proceedings against them for their unwarrantable interference with my privacy. Who were they, now? At once!”
“It’s absolutely impossible for us to do that, sir,” Peter said firmly, and Tod might have been heard to murmur something about “can’t and won’t.”
“Then,” said Mr. Neatby, “you will both come with me to the principal now at once.”
* * * * *
The principal of that school is one of the youngest headmasters in England, and he would not be the success he is did he not possess a sense of humor. He partially pacified Mr. Neatby; he vigorously “tanned” Tod and Peter there and then, and during the remainder of the evening he laughed to himself more than once.
For the remainder of the term Tod and Peter found their comings and goings so perpetually watched and suspected by the “young brusher” aforesaid, that even the rapturous recollection of the success of their sending was somewhat dimmed. But it was not they who suffered most; to this day Mr. Neatby suspects of sinister intention anyone who so much as mentions kittens in his presence, and new boys always wonder why their schoolfellows are so anxious that they should mew in the chemistry lectures. They only do it once.
III
THE BOY THAT DIDN’T COME
During the first part of the next, the Easter, term the twins were so closely watched that their genius for mischief had small scope. Whereupon the authorities, finding them apparently absorbed in games and the general routine, relaxed their vigilance.
At the beginning of February the weather was mild and pleasant, with just enough rain to keep the footer ground in good order. But at the end of that fickle month there came a frost, the aggravating sort of frost that makes a field too hard for football and yet leads to no skating.
The never long dormant spirit of mischief in the twins awoke.
As usual, it was Peter who began it, though Tod was the innocent first cause.
Just after first lesson, as Tod was hurrying from one classroom to another, he met the principal in the corridor, who bade him ask his form-master to come and speak to him at a quarter past ten. Further down the corridor Tod met his twin, who instantly demanded what the “Pot” wanted, and on being informed, went upon his way.
Peter might have been seen to stop more than one schoolfellow as he went--the corridor was full of boys changing classrooms--and when he reached his own he delivered a message to the effect that the Head would like to see his form-master at ten-fifteen.
Peter’s form-master, familiarly known as “Pig-Face,” from a fancied resemblance to that animal in the matter of nose, is a testy man, much given to abusing his form and to the use of opprobrious epithets seriously reflecting upon the veracity of boys in general; so, on receipt of the Head’s message, he knuckled Peter’s head, called him a “shuffling little beast,” set a complicated sum in discount for his form to wrestle with during his absence, and hurried away, fuming inwardly at the unreason of such a summons in the middle of morning school. When he arrived at the principal’s room he found six other masters also in waiting, but the principal himself was not there.
It happened that that gentleman had met Tod’s form-master three minutes after he had seen Tod, he said what he had to say there and then in the corridor, and dismissed the matter from his mind.
The seven masters waited in a grumpy group for ten good minutes, when, just as they had decided upon immediate departure, the principal himself rushed in and gazed in somewhat indignant astonishment at the assembled multitude.
It took nearly five minutes more to explain the situation, and the only boy whose conduct in delivering the various messages seemed not wholly inexplicable appeared to be Peter. For the principal good-naturedly came to the conclusion that it must have been Peter that he met, not Tod, and that Peter had misunderstood him.
Such a charitable view of Peter’s conduct, however, could not last long, seeing that six angry masters rushed back to their respective forms to inflict lines upon six perfectly innocent boys, who were not slow to protest that the message was entrusted to them by another.
During the morning three young gentlemen from the Modern and four from the Classical received a summons “to the principal at twelve,” and of course Tod and Peter were of the number, both looking so seraphically innocent that the principal was perfectly sure that it was “a put-up thing.” In this instance the innocent suffered with the guilty, for Tod got five hundred lines as well as Peter. But they both agreed that to have so scored off seven “brushers” at one time was well worth the lines.
Three days afterward Tod’s nose bled toward the end of morning school and he was dismissed to his house to clean up. As he raced along the corridor he noticed that the door of the little room into which the rope of the school bell descended was left open, and, peeping in, he discovered that Hooper, the trusty porter, was not within.
In far less time than it takes to write the words, Tod had rushed in, and the great school bell that dismisses morning school rang loud and clear over the peaceful playing-fields surrounding the school buildings, still humming with the busy life within.
Every boy and every master stopped short in what he was doing and looked at the clock. Those possessed of watches consulted them, shook them, listened to them, dubiously pressing them to unbelieving ears. And as the clocks in that school are by no means beyond reproach, being worked by a system of electricity that is, to say the least of it, capricious in its conduct, all came, not unwillingly, to the conclusion that morning work had indeed ended. Only the Head of the Modern, that man of iron endurance, whose whole scheme of creation seemed bounded by the exigencies of the Civil Service Commissioners, refused to believe that his watch was wrong, and continued to discuss the “directrix and eccentric” of a certain angle until it was really twelve o’clock; while one of the French masters, hailing from Geneva, proclaimed the unreliability of English clocks in general.
Meanwhile Hooper, who had gone down to the lodge to speak to his wife, could hardly believe his ears when his own sacred bell clanged, somewhat irresponsibly and gaily it is true, without his agency.
He rushed up the drive to discover the perpetrator of this extraordinary outrage, only to meet a throng of masters and boys streaming out into the playground full twenty minutes before the appointed hour.
Tod was nearly at his house by this time, and when he did arrive, hastened to the matron to descant upon the terrific hemorrhage that had occurred in his nose.
But Nemesis was never very leaden-footed where the twins were concerned.
“Other chaps,” Tod remarked mournfully, “can break all sorts of rules and do no end of mischief and never get found out, but if we do the least little thing someone’s certain to be down on us like a hundred of bricks, or else we’re obliged to own up to save somebody else.”
In this case it was the latter course that Tod had to pursue. The principal was exceedingly angry at such a wanton curtailment of the last hour of morning school, and gave it out in the afternoon that if the amateur bellringer did not disclose himself that very day, the whole school should stay in on the next half-holiday; and the frost had broken and football was in full swing once more.
Of course Tod sought the principal at the earliest opportunity and owned up.
When he appeared in the principal’s room after afternoon school he made, it is true, a valiant effort to present himself with due solemnity, but his round face was absurdly chubby and cheerful, and when the principal looked up from the letter he was writing to see who the intruder was, he sighed deeply.
“You again, Beaton!” he exclaimed wearily. “So it was _you_, was it, who rang that bell? What on earth did you do it for?”
“My nose bled, sir....” Tod began eagerly.
“What had your nose to do with it?”
“Everything, sir. I was sent out of class....”
“Sent out of class?” the principal repeated sternly.
“Because I made such a mess,” Tod hastened to add; “and the little door was open--and so I rang the bell.”
“Beaton, when will you cease to play these senseless and annoying tricks? Your folly caused six hundred boys, to say nothing of the masters, to lose twenty precious minutes. If I punished you as you deserve, you ought to stay in for twenty minutes each day for six hundred days....”
Tod gasped.
“But I won’t do that. Instead, you must do a thousand lines, to be given up by the end of this week. I shall not cane you, as I have no doubt you would infinitely prefer it.”
A good many boys assisted to write those lines, and the impost was given up at its appointed time.
Hockey leagues were on and Peter was playing in his house team. On the morning of the last practice before an important match, he acknowledged so barely bowing an acquaintance with certain French idioms beloved of the French master--for was he not their author?--that Peter was told to stay in after morning school and learn them.
Peter did nothing of the kind; on the contrary, he went out at the usual hour and played hockey with his accustomed vigor, with the result that the French master sent for him that afternoon to know why he had not done as he was told.
Peter pleaded “a very important engagement,” and, on being pressed to disclose the nature of that same, as usual answered quite truthfully. The French master, not unnaturally exasperated, forthwith reported him to the Head of the Modern, with the result that Peter was hauled up and bidden to stay in on the next half-holiday; the very half-holiday on which his house was to play its bitterest rival.
During the remainder of that term he got into several rows with his form-master, and Tod was equally unlucky, so that by the time the Easter holidays arrived both boys were quite ready for them and left school vowing vengeance on their persecutors.
Their parents were in India, so they went to spend the holidays with a jolly young bachelor uncle, who was an ardent fisherman and carried both the boys off with him for three weeks’ peel-fishing in a remote village in North Wales. He was also of a literary turn, that uncle, and took with him a box of books to enliven their evenings: lots of Kipling and Stevenson, and amongst the latter the “Life and Letters.” He read aloud the “Thomas Libby” incident, where Stevenson and certain kindred spirits roused a whole neighborhood to excitement by constant inquiries as to the whereabouts of one “Thomas Libby,” who existed only in his creator’s vivid imagination. That of the twins was immediately fired by an ambition to go and do likewise.
The incident, or rather series of incidents, to which the non-appearance of Mr. Libby led up, enchanted them. They chuckled over the mysterious Thomas for a whole day, but it was not till evening, at bedtime, that Tod whispered to Peter how, like “Sentimental Tommy,” he had “found a way.”
Sitting on the side of his bed, he announced gleefully: “Tell you what it is, Peter, we’ll be a parent! A parent with a delicate kid! And we’ll write long-winded letters in scratchy, small handwriting, you know, like the masters write....”
“But,” Peter interrupted excitedly, “how are we to get the answers? It wouldn’t be any fun if we didn’t.”
“The answers,” Tod replied calmly, “will come to the post office here, where we’re living, you juggins! You bet there’ll be answers. They’re awfully keen after the oof at the good old school. Why, they scent a new boy a mile off. He shall go into old Pig-Face’s house, just to pay him out for all his beastliness to you, and I’ll pester the Head about him and his delicate chest, and all that sort of rot that parents _do_ write, don’t you know.”
Peter gasped. “But how can he ‘go’ into anybody’s house if there isn’t a him to go?”
“What an ass you are, Peter! _Was_ there a Thomas Libby? And how many people’s houses was he going to, pray?”
“Go on,” said Peter humbly, “go on.”
“The parent’s name,” Tod announced proudly, “is Theopompus Buggins.”
“Theopompus!” Peter echoed dubiously. “It doesn’t sound very real somehow--and is the kid to be young Theopompus?”
“No,” said Tod firmly, “_his_ name is Archibald, and Mr. Buggins is his uncle.”
“I thought he was to be a parent,” Peter objected in a dissatisfied voice.
“Well, an uncle is a sort of parent; probably the kid’s an orphan.”
There was silence for a minute while Peter digested this view of the matter. But still he was not quite satisfied, for presently he said: “Tod, would _you_ believe in anyone called ‘Theopompus Buggins’?”
“Well, no, I’m not sure that I would,” Tod admitted. “Why?”
“D’you believe the Head will?”
“I never thought of that.”
“I think,” Peter suggested beguilingly, “that we had better have a commoner name, don’t you?”
“P’r’aps we had,” Tod sighed. “Let’s have Jones--Theopompus Jones, now.”
“Jones is all right,” Peter allowed graciously, “but I don’t fancy Theopompus much, it’s such a peculiar name.”
“It’s a splendid name,” Tod exclaimed huffily, “but of course if you think it’s too uncommon he can be ‘T. Jones, Esq.,’ or ‘John Jones’ if you insist upon it. How would you like ‘Peter Jones’?”
“T. Jones will do spiffingly,” Peter answered with some haste. “_We’ll_ know his name is Theopompus right enough, and it don’t matter a hang to them whether he’s Theobald or Theophilus or anything; but I say, Tod, must he be an uncle?”
“Yes,” Tod replied firmly, “he jolly well must, and, what’s more, he’s got to be going to Injia just as term begins. We’ll look out the sailings in uncle’s paper and choose his ship. He’ll just get there in the hot weather, but that can’t be helped.”
The twins were well acquainted with the whereabouts of “sailings” in the papers, as most Anglo-Indian children are.
“Why, you’ve planned it all, Tod,” Peter said admiringly. “How’ll you do about the writing?”
“I shall write as like old Stinks as possible, that niggly, scrabbly sort of writing, _you_ know.”
“By Jove! So you can--that’ll be all right. Parents and people call that sort of writing ‘scholarly,’ but if we did it they’d say we were beastly illiterate or something.”
“What I like about a scholarly handwriting,” said Tod thoughtfully, “is that no mortal can tell whether the spelling’s right or not. When I’m once through the Shop I shall always write a scholarly hand and not bother about spelling and that any more.”
“Boys,” a voice called from the next room, “you get to bed and don’t keep jawing all night.”
* * * * *
It would not be fair to disclose the exact spot in Wales from which that anxious relative, Mr. T. Jones, indited his first letter to the headmaster of the Public School which reckoned Tod and Peter among its pupils.
“There are several L’s in the place where he dwells, And of W’s more than one.”
but it is impossible to be more explicit than this.
The Principal of Harchester School was at breakfast in his hotel at the seaside when a letter marked “urgent” and “if away please forward immediately” reached him. He turned it over thoughtfully before opening it, for he thought he recognized the handwriting of one of his masters (familiarly referred to by Tod and Peter as “old Stinks”), a science master, much given to drawing his attention to various details by means of lengthy epistles.
“What in the world can Neatby want now?” he wondered, “and in the holidays, too; it really is a little too bad!”
On opening the letter, however, he found that it was not from Mr. Neatby, and set himself forthwith to decipher a missive in which the margins were clear and spacious as the writing was small and obscure. Yet it had the air, so the principal remarked to himself, of being the letter of an educated man. Tod had played the “scholarly” game with entire success.
The letter was as follows:
“DEAR SIR,
“I am desirous that my only nephew, Archibald Jones, aged thirteen years and six months, should be enrolled among the pupils of your famous seminary at the commencement of the summer session. But before placing him under your benignant charge there are several points upon which I am desirous of enlightenment. Certain friends have recommended to me the house of one Mr. Mannock, but from other sources I have gathered that he is a man of somewhat violent temper, sometimes almost abusive, in his intercourse with the boys. Is this so? Because, if it is, I shall require to seek some other house in which to place my nephew, an orphan of extremely sensitive disposition, with a weak chest. It is possible that the accounts I have heard of Mr. Mannock’s violence may be exaggerated, and I should like Archibald to enter his house unless you especially warn me against it. I wish my nephew to be entered upon the Classical side, as I am given to understand that boys are less overworked in that department than in that where they prepare for the Army. And as his delicate chest will prevent my nephew joining in the rougher sports of his contemporaries, I would suggest that one of the younger masters should be told off to take Archibald for a walk every fine day, as, of course, a certain amount of fresh air and exercise is essential. He must not be placed in too high a class, as owing to illness he has not been able to make such rapid progress in his studies as his robuster contemporaries.
“Any information that you can afford me--and as early an answer as possible, for I am leaving England at the beginning of May and wish to see my dear nephew comfortably settled before I sail--will greatly oblige
“Yours truly, “T. JONES.”
Tod had written “yours turly,” but was corrected by Peter, who, if he had less sense of style, was fairly dependable where spelling was concerned.
Now the postmistress, their landlady, found her household duties so much increased by the presence of her lodgers that she was fain to depute her official cares to her daughter, Katie, a damsel who greatly admired the good-looking twins. And when they confided to her that if a letter came addressed to “T. Jones, Esq.” it really was for one of them, she asked no questions, required no further information, but, concluding that it was only a part of their mysterious charm to receive letters in a name other than their own, promised to guard the same should it come, without pointing out to anybody that just then no person of the name of Jones was residing at the post office.
The letter came in two days and ran as follows:
“DEAR SIR,
“I enclose the entrance form to be filled up by any parent or guardian desirous of placing a boy at Harchester School. With regard to the house in which you wish your nephew to board, Mr. Mannock’s is, as I hope are all our houses, entirely satisfactory. But if your nephew is, as you imply, a delicate boy, I would suggest that he should be placed in one of the smaller boarding-houses, as he would then receive more individual attention than it is possible to bestow in a house where there are some fifty boys. I have asked the bursar to send you a prospectus, in which you will find the names and addresses of all the masters in the school who take boys; and lest the house you select should be already full, I advise you to communicate with the master at your earliest convenience.”
When Mr. Theopompus Jones in the dual shape of Tod and Peter received this missive they retired to a distant bridge, whereon they sat to read it, and they laughed so much that they nearly fell over backward into the river. They gloated over the very envelope. But later on, when their first glee at getting an answer at all had somewhat abated, they expressed disappointment that the Head had omitted to answer so many of their questions.
“You see,” Peter cried indignantly, “what a shufflin’ old hypocrite he is. You can’t get a straight answer from him about old Pig-Face, and he knows what an old brute he is just as well as we do.”
“Shall we send dear Archibald into one of the smaller houses?” Tod asked thoughtfully.
“No,” Peter thundered. “He’s going to old Pig-Face, and to no one else. Who knows but he may save some decent chap from going there? Let’s write again to the Pot, it’s such a lark, he answers so nice and quick. Why, there’s over a fortnight more of the holidays; we can get a whole volume of his oily old letters by that time. I’ve always wondered how humbugs like him manage to grease up to one’s people so, and for the life of me I can’t see why now.”
That night the twins again engaged in literary labors, much to their uncle’s surprise, but he was an ardent bridge player, and, having found three like-minded anglers at the village inn, he was glad to leave his lively nephews so peacefully employed.
“Are you chaps writing a story?” he asked that evening as he departed to his bridge.
“Yes,” “No,” the twins answered simultaneously, then Tod answered with some decision: “No, Uncle Frank, we’re writing letters, business letters, that’s all.”
“Dear me,” their uncle replied, much impressed, and, having a peace-loving and incurious disposition, he asked no further questions and was soon contentedly playing a “no trumps” hand with conspicuous success.
A day or two later the headmaster of Harchester sighed gently as he found beside his plate at breakfast another bulky epistle from the anxious-minded Mr. T. Jones. This time that gentleman did not content himself with generalities; he made the most searching inquiries as to the disposition of the aforesaid Mr. Mannock.
After thanking the headmaster of Harchester for his “polite letter” (the headmaster raised his eyebrows as he reached this phrase), Mr. Jones continued:
“I fear that I cannot fall in with your suggestion of a private boarding-house for my dear nephew. In the first place it is too expensive, and in the second place I wish him to go into Mr. Mannock’s house if you can satisfy me that he is of the considerate and forbearing disposition that a man placed in his responsible position ought to be. I am pressed for time, as I sail on May 1st for Bombay, and an early answer will greatly oblige.
“Yours truly, “T. JONES.”
Tod and Peter had the very greatest fun in filling in the form of application. They had long ago decided that the youthful Archibald was to enter on the Classical side, that he was destined for the Church, that his father was “deceased,” but as to the late gentleman’s profession they squabbled. Peter wanted Army or Indian Civil; Tod was in favor of Navy or Church; when Peter suddenly recollected that there were “lists and things” in most of the recognized professions and that an “inquisitive old buffer like the Pot would be certain to look him up.”
Finally they decided that the deceased one had better be a “merchant.” Peter wanted to add “prince,” but Tod, the far-seeing, pointed out that such affluence would hardly coincide with an objection to one of the smaller boarding-houses on the score of expense.
Finally they despatched their entrance form “to the bursar,” elaborately filled up in the scholarly handwriting of Mr. Theopompus Jones, the handwriting that so puzzled the Principal of Harchester by its haunting resemblance to that of one of his masters.
Again the Pot was prompt and courteous, and by return the twins were gloating over another letter, which, however, again disappointed them by its brevity.
“DEAR SIR (it ran),
“As your time in this country is indeed getting short, I would advise you at once to confer personally with Mr. Mannock as to whether he can find room for your nephew or not; for, in the event of his having no vacancy, you still may be enabled to place the boy in one of the other houses.”
“Oh, the shuffler!” Peter shouted indignantly. “The quibbler! The sanctimonious humbug! _He_ thinks he’s diddled Theopompus Jones, does he? He’ll find out his mistake before very long; it’ll be Theopompus Jones has diddled _him_. I wouldn’t trust that man with a bad halfpenny. He can’t answer a straight question, that’s what he can’t do--and yet to hear him talk....”
“I say,” interrupted Tod, “suppose they send in the bill, what’ll we do?”
“You don’t propose we should pay it, do you, you young ass?” Peter returned scornfully. “They never send ’em in till just before term, sometimes not till after. Don’t you remember how the pater grumbled last autumn because it _didn’t_ come, and he wanted everything settled up before he sailed?”
“So does Mr. Jones want it all settled before he sails,” Tod remarked gaily. “He ought to write to old Pig-Face to-night.”
This the dual Mr. Jones did, and, as before, received an answer by return of post from Mr. Mannock, who, strange to say, had just one vacancy, and expressed his willingness that Archibald Jones should fill that same. And Mr. T. Jones, refraining from further researches into the character of Mr. Mannock, wrote with his own scholarly hand, or rather hands, a letter which announced the pending arrival of Archibald.
By this time the holidays were nearly over, and the twins began to be somewhat anxious as to the termination of Mr. Jones’ correspondence with the authorities at Harchester School. But their good genius did not desert them at the last moment, for just the day before they left Wales, when they were at their wits’ end for a satisfactory ending to the episode, they came across the “List of Members” of their uncle’s club; and, idly turning over the leaves, Tod found that there were no fewer than thirteen members of the same surname as the anxious uncle of their creation and three of them had “T” for their initial. Instantly Tod’s resource was stimulated, and he despatched three letters in the most scholarly of handwritings to his headmaster, to Mr. Mannock, and to the bursar respectively, announcing his immediate departure for London and requesting that all future communications might be addressed to him at the club in question.
In his letter to Mr. Mannock, he informed him that Archibald would be sent one day earlier than that given for the return of the other boys, as he, Mr. Jones, would be so much occupied in arrangements for his voyage that he would be unable to give the boy the careful supervision his sensitive disposition and delicate health demanded.
“We shan’t see their pompous old letters and bills and things,” sighed Peter, “but it will liven up the Jones fraternity at uncle’s club--it’s a good thing he’s not going back to town just yet, or he might hear something--and Pig-Face will simply raise Cain when that precious Archibald mysteriously disappears. We’re sure to hear about that, anyway; two of his chaps are in my form, jolly decent chaps they are, too.”
“Mind you never _ask_ anything about it,” said Tod warningly. “They might suspect something, and if we were ever found to have had any hand in this we’d be sacked, sure as a gun. We’ve had our fun and now we must jolly well keep it dark. By the time it’s all finished I should say both the Head and old Pig-Face will have done their thousand lines apiece, shouldn’t you?”
* * * * *
“Curious thing that fellow never turning up, isn’t it?” one of the “decent chaps” in Mr. Mannock’s house remarked to Peter, some three days after term had begun. “Pig-Face is in an awful stew about it--afraid the boy’s been murdered or something.”
“What boy? What d’you mean?” Peter asked innocently. “Who hasn’t come back?”
“No one hasn’t come back; it’s a new chap hasn’t turned up at all. Both he and his people have mysteriously disappeared, vamoosed, vanished! Awfully funny thing. There’s no end of a fuss.”
“P’r’aps he changed his mind at the last minute,” Peter suggested. “P’r’aps he heard something about old Pig-Face and funked it.”
“I don’t know,” said the other. “Old Pig-Face looks awfully worried. Shouldn’t wonder if we had detectives down, and all sorts of games.”
Peter looked thoughtful for a minute, and then, to the astonishment of his friend, who was really impressed by the enigma, doubled up with uncontrollable laughter.
The assistance of Scotland Yard, however, was not called in; for, on writing to the Bishop and Admiral given as references by Mr. T. Jones (boldly lifted, address and all, from “Who’s Who,” by the ingenious Tod), the headmaster of Harchester received an emphatic disclaimer from each of these gentlemen of any knowledge of any such person. Moreover, an inquiry at the post office of the Welsh village from which Mr. Jones’ letters were dated only elicited the laconic response of “Gone away--address not known.”
Katie had received and faithfully followed her instructions.
Every Jones of the whole thirteen in that club was approached in vain, and inquiry at the shipping office only elicited the fact that, plentiful as persons bearing that patronymic appeared to be, no passenger of that name had sailed by that particular boat.
The authorities at Harchester came to the unwelcome conclusion that they had been hoaxed; and all that remained of the incident were certain letters, treasured, on the one hand for purposes of possible identification, on the other for more frivolous reasons.
“TONY”
Tony sat in the gutter, wondering what would be the coolest thing to do. The front doors of all the houses in the dull, quite respectable street, wherein he dwelt, were close shut, as were also the white-curtained windows, lest dust should blow in and sully these hall-marks of houses that possess a front “best room.” The neighboring children were all away; some at the recreation ground, some to paddle their feet in the nearest approach to a river the town boasted--a little muddy stream about a foot deep at the best of times; now a sort of pea soup.
But on this August afternoon Tony felt too slack and too sticky to seek any amusement that necessitated a walk; so, having been thrust out of the back door by his mother, who was washing and wanted no boys “clutterin’ round”--he strolled lanquidly to the front, quite sure that here, at any rate, he would be left in peace, as the dwellers in Eva Terrace never used their front doors except on Sundays.
Just then a man carrying a bag came running down the road, which was a short cut to the station.
“Here, youngster!” he shouted, throwing the bag to Tony. “Carry this for me, and I’ll just do it! Run after me for all you’re worth!”
Tony caught the bag dexterously and ran. He could run faster than the man, and was soon jogging on ahead of him. At the station Tony got sixpence for his pains, thrust it deep into his right trouser pocket, and walked soberly away.
Infinite possibilities were opened up by this unexpected windfall, and he had no intention of mentioning it at home. His people were poor, but not poorer than their neighbors; his brothers and sisters were all older than he, and in his case Benjamin’s lot was not accompanied by the advantages with which it is generally accredited.
A lonely child was Tony, gentle and biddable enough, quick at his books, and happiest in his school hours, when people let him alone, and he succeeded in pleasing the clever, testy schoolmaster, whose life was embittered by a constant struggle with an overwhelming desire to whack the young demons who tormented him. He had been “summonsed” twice by irate parents; so now he restrained himself at the expense of his teaching powers and his nerves generally.
Tony stopped in the middle of the road and smacked his pocket.
“I’ll go to the baths to-morrow morning,” he said aloud, “and see them young nobs swim; it’s only threepence before nine.”
A great excitement--unshared, unmentioned--had lately come into Tony’s life. Every morning for the last week, about eight o’clock he had watched for two boys who went by on bicycles with towels strapped on to their handle-bars. One was quite a little boy, far less than Tony himself; the other bigger, and in his eyes less interesting; and in a few minutes after them came one for whom Tony had conceived the extravagant, unreasoning admiration children will sometimes lavish on somebody with whom they have never exchanged, or hope to exchange, two words; someone unconscious of their existence as they are the richer for that other’s.
Everybody in Tony’s locality knew the recruiting sergeant by sight: “Sergeant” who taught drill and gymnastics to all the “young gen’lemen” in the neighborhood. But Tony adored him, not only because he was so tall and good looking--and Tony was strenuously certain that it is a goodly thing to be upstanding and to have broad shoulders, instead of the champagne-bottle variety carried by his brothers and their like--but because he knew that the sergeant wished him well; inasmuch as that he, even he also, was one of the hundred and fifty odd boys in the parish schools of St. James’s. For now that the war fever was somewhat abating, now that Sergeant himself had come back from the front that he might send more soldiers out there, he had offered to drill the boys in St. James’s schools twice a week for love. And it could not be arranged.
The authorities, while granting the utility of algebra and French to those in the seventh standard, who were presently to form the bulk and bulwark of the nation, saw no good reason why an attempt should be made to give them straight backs and broad chests. So Sergeant, who loved his country, and was, in his way, something of a philanthropist, sighed and swore, and “put the question by.”
But Tony, who had heard the subject canvassed, and listened to the lamentations of the boys, was filled with a passion of gratitude, which found no expression save in a constant hanging round corners to see his idol pass.
* * * * *
Tony sat on his bed naked, in a patch of moonlight, admiring his own legs.
“My body be whiter nor theirn,” he said to himself, and indeed, his limbs looked radiantly fair in the mellow light. “But my arms beant so ’ard as ’is’n for all ’e be such little chap,” he continued, pinching the soft flesh of the upper arm in a dissatisfied way.
Tony was too excited to sleep just yet--such a great deal had happened in the last two days. In all his ten years he had never felt as he felt now--and yet, from an outsider’s point of view, what a little thing it was!
The day before he had gone to the swimming bath, intending just to watch. It was empty, save for Sergeant and the two boys who went with him every morning. The water looked so clear, and there seemed so much room in the big bath, that Tony undressed and went in.
He paddled shyly about in the shallow end, admiring the two boys, who dived off the spring-board and the pulpit and swam under water, while Sergeant roared directions at them, and flung them head over heels in the deep end, in a fashion that filled Tony with surprise.
The big boy was practising side-stroke, when the little one, whom Sergeant, for some reason or other, called the “swashbuckler,” swam down the bath toward Tony, remarking cheerfully:
“You’ll get rheumatism if you paddle so. Shall I show you the first exercise?”
He was such a little boy, but he swam like a frog. His square, freckled face was so friendly that Tony forgot that he himself was an “oik,” and therefore his sworn foe, and said, “Please, sir!” in the meekest of tiny whispers.
“You must kneel on the edge further down, and let me chuck you in,” was the next command--and Sergeant stopped in the very middle of a shout to chuckle and whisper:
“Blest if the swashbuckler isn’t giving a swimming lesson on his own account!”
And now Tony sat on the edge of his bed and remembered two wonderful mornings, and pondered what it could be that made that friendly little boy so different from all the other boys he knew. And through all his thinking, like the refrain of a song, sounded a sentence he had once heard at Sunday school. He could not remember the whole of it; but five words seemed to batter at his brain as though demanding instant comprehension and attention--“_The temple of your body._”
Tony nodded as though in answer to a spoken word. He pictured Sergeant cleaving the water with his long arms, the muscles standing out on his white shoulders.
“I s’pose,” said Tony softly, as if in answer to that unseen, persistent voice, “some folks ’as temples for bodies, and some folks ’as on’y tin churches, or, so to speak, a public.... I’d like a temple myself for ch’ice.”
He was not very sure what a temple was, but in a vague way he _was_ assured that it was something large and beautiful; and his conception was helped out by hazy recollections of Sunday school and Solomon, and thoughts of a building spacious and white.
“There used to be a free night,” he continued, reverting again to the actual, “but the Corpeeration stopped it--I wonder w’y? It’s tuppence after six, that’s a shillin’ a week--’ow can pore boys get that?--an’ I promised ’im as I’d learn the others w’en I could get a chanst, when he’s learned me....”
Tony’s voice faltered, he was getting sleepy. He gave his smooth white arms another stroke, slipped into his nightshirt, and got into bed.
“E’ve give oi a shillin’ to pay for four more mornin’s, till ’e do go away,” he whispered ecstatically as he laid his head on the pillow, and Tony fell asleep.
That evening Tony’s elder brother “Earny,” who cleaned bicycles, and was ’prenticed to a dealer in the neighborhood, wanted his Sunday necktie, for he purposed to “walk out with his young lady.” He ran upstairs to the room he shared with Tony and another brother, to find the little boy fast asleep, worn out by unusual exercise and varied emotions.
Earny could not find his tie, and on lifting Tony’s trousers to see if by any chance it was hidden beneath them, a shilling rolled out of the pocket and finished spinning with a clang, just in the very centre of the patch of moonlight where a quarter of an hour earlier Tony had decided that he, at all events, “would ’ave a temple for ch’ice.”
“’Ullo!” thought Earny to himself, “where did that kid collar a bob? ’E bin a’ter no good, I’ll be boun’, so secret-like and sayin’ nothin’ to nobody. Serve ’im right if I buys some smokes with ’un;” and Earny departed quietly, without having fulfilled his original intention of waking Tony that he might look for the missing necktie.
At nine o’clock the following morning Tony still lay upon his bed, wide-eyed, white-cheeked, with blank despair writ large upon his face. Breakfast was over long ago, his family had all departed to their daily work; his mother was ironing in the kitchen, he could hear the bump of the iron as she slammed it on the table; the bedroom could wait till one of the girls came in at dinner-time, so no one interfered with Tony.
He knew that it was his brother who must have taken the shilling--the precious shilling that had meant so much to him. He knew that he had no redress, no one would believe him if he told them how he came by it, and in his utter misery he was too poor-spirited even to think of reprisals. His whole imagination centred round the dreadful certainty that Sergeant and the little gen’leman and the little gen’leman’s brother would think him a fraud. For a brief space the sun had shone out on his drab life, discovering hitherto undreamt-of colors in the landscape, but now....
“I can never watch for ’em no more,” he said, with a hard, tearless sob.
Presently he stood out on the floor and shook his nightshirt about his feet; he dressed quickly, and did not even wash his face as he was wont to do.
“’Tain’t no use for the likes of me to try,” he said bitterly.
Then he went to his brother’s drawer and stole the bundle of cigarettes he found there, and went out and smoked under the railway bridge till his body was as sick as his heart.
A SQUARE PEG
“I told him plainly beforehand that if he did not get a scholarship this term he must go into business. He has not won a scholarship, and, situated as you are, any other course would be absurd.”
Uncle Henry shut his mouth with a snap, while he stared fixedly over his sister’s head that he might not see the pleading in her eyes as she said timidly:
“But fourteen is so young, Henry, and Rodney is so small for his age----”
“I fail to see that his size has anything to do with it; and you, Felicia, must learn to face things as they are, not as you would have them. If you defer for one moment the chance of Rodney’s making his own living, you are doing an injustice both to him and to his sisters. Pardon my plain speaking, but he is the son of an exceedingly poor widow and must be dealt with accordingly.”
Through the open windows came the sound of a boy’s laughter and the ring of a smartly struck cricket ball. Uncle Henry waved his hand in the direction of the sound, saying:
“There, you see; that’s what his education at present amounts to; he’s a pretty bat, and doubtless looks forward to a life all flannels and cider-cup and yells of admiration when he makes a few runs; the sooner all that nonsense is knocked out of him the better.”
“But Rodney is not idle, Henry,” his mother pleaded; “his form-master and the Head both speak well of him and say that he has a very good chance next year, although he has missed this; you know the exam. came on just after his father’s death, when the boy was dreadfully upset.”
“I have made you an offer, you may take it or leave it. You can put him into one of my businesses; there will be no premium, and I’ll pay for his board at a thoroughly good boarding-house I know of in Mecklenburg Square, where he will be well looked after. In the meantime you must try to let this house, and then you can come up and live in the suburbs, and he can live with you and go to business every day by train; the little girls can go to a High School. With the many claims I have upon me, this is all that I can do, and I must serve you in the way that seems best to me.”
Uncle Henry sat down and took up the newspaper in token that the subject was thoroughly threshed out. He had gone into business at fourteen, and now at little past thirty had a house in Grosvenor Gardens and a “place down the river.” He had married at six-and-twenty, “going where money was.” The names of his two sons were down for Harrow, while his wife already talked of the time when she should “present” their baby girl. He quite acknowledged that it was his duty to help his sister now that the collapse of those Australian banks had practically beggared her; but there was at the back of his mind a lurking satisfaction that the way he had chosen should be one calculated to destroy those castles of tradition her husband had been so fond of building. It was a perpetual annoyance both to his wife and to himself that Rodney and his sisters should be so very different in appearance from their own children; that, clean or dirty, these children without a sixpence should so strongly resemble the old family portraits that his brother-in-law’s ridiculous will forbade to be sold; that they should in speech and bearing so unmistakably be gentlefolk, and yet be his own sister’s children seemed to him a proof of nature’s ineptitude.
To be sure he and Felcourt had been on friendly enough terms, but he had always--though through no fault of Felcourt’s--been conscious that his brother-in-law and his ancestors for generations belonged to a class which only of late, and that not altogether with enthusiasm, has opened its doors to successful men of Uncle Henry’s stamp.
Rodney’s mother went and stood by the open window. The active white figures flying between the wickets on the wide lawn seemed all blurred and indistinct, and she lifted her slim hand to her throat to still its throbbing ache; she was not a strong-minded woman. All she had asked of life was the power to make folks happy, and to be loved; and hitherto her desire had been generously fulfilled. Married at eighteen to a man who, taking her out of somewhat sordid and uncongenial surroundings, made her queen of a household where gaiety and good manners had been vassals for generations, she readily adapted herself to the new atmosphere, and became a sweet-voiced echo of her husband, and for fourteen years was absurdly happy. Then Rodney Felcourt died, and six months afterward came the collapse of the Australian banks.
Uncle Henry had a way of carrying through any course of action he had determined upon, and by the beginning of October his nephew Rodney found himself taking his exercise in the Gray’s Inn Road instead of in the playing-fields at school. The change of life was so radical and so sudden that the child hardly understood what had happened. Like the old woman in the nursery rhyme, he was forever exclaiming, “This be never I!” in melancholy astonishment. He was learning to tie up parcels, he stuck on endless quantities of postage stamps, and occasionally addressed a few envelopes for one of the typists. He did what he was told as well as he could, the day seemed endlessly long, and by evening he was so tired that he went to bed soon after the seven-o’clock dinner. A young boy for his age, he was quite unprecocious and unformed; hitherto his place in the universe had been clearly defined and not difficult to fill; to do well in his form, thus pleasing the “mater” and his form-master, to be “decent” to his little sisters at home, and “jolly” with the chaps at school, to be good at games and get into the “house” eleven, and to be absolutely “straight” in word, deed, and across country--such was Rodney’s conception of the whole duty of boy, and he had acted up to it with considerable success. Now, life was not only complicated but unintelligible, and he was too bewildered even to rebel against a fate that kept him tying up parcels indifferently well when he felt that by all the ordinary standards of conduct he ought to have been writing Latin verses.
Every Sunday he wrote neat, stilted little letters to his mother, which informed her that he had been to church at the Foundling, was going for a walk in the afternoon, that he was well and hoped that she was well, and that he was her very loving son. Felicia crushed the paper against her cheek in the vain attempt to extract from it something real and Rodney-like. She thought of the school letters last term, how full of life they had been, how numerous the requests they contained! Rodney never asked for anything now, and she knew that the boy was holding himself well in hand lest any part of the truth might hurt her.
At the end of October, Cecil Connop came back from Paris. His arrival was announced in all the papers, for he was of some importance in literary circles; his great ability was acknowledged on all sides, the more freely that he was something of a failure. Though his work was widely read and appreciated by cultivated people, he was not popular. His appearance was quite ordinary, and he made no attempt to resemble any historical personage. He abhorred advertisement, considering that his published writings had no sort of connection with his private life. His readers were quite ignorant as to whether he had a mother or not, and his personal friends suffered under no apprehension that their loves or their bereavements would figure, flimsily disguised, in his next book. His rooms in Jermyn Street had never been photographed, and only his servant knew whether he liked his bath hot or cold. The fact was that Cecil Connop kept one face for the world and quite another for the old friends who loved him--a proceeding so out of date among literary people as to be almost medieval. But it has its advantages for such as like curtains to their windows. According to his own account he never had any money, and was, when in England, in hourly danger of Holloway Jail; but he paid his card debts and never seemed to lack any of the things that go toward making life pleasant.
Felicia’s letter announcing little Rodney’s apprenticeship was a great surprise to Cecil. He had, of course, heard of her serious losses, but he knew that her brother was a wealthy man and “people always manage somehow”; that in this case they hadn’t “managed” came upon him with quite an unpleasant shock.
For some reason which she would not define even to herself, Felicia had not asked any of her friends then in town to look up Rodney. She was absolutely certain in her own mind that he had no business there, but circumstances were too strong for her, and she dared not offend Henry. When she read in the paper that Cecil had returned to town she felt distinctly relieved. Here was an understanding person who would ask no questions and could be depended upon to give a faithful account of the child.
Cecil wrote at once to Rodney asking him to lunch at his club on the following Saturday, and to Felicia, to say how pleased he would be to do what he could for him while he was in town.
Rodney sat on the edge of his bed, too tired to undress. His flannels and “sweater” were spread on the pillow, and from time to time the boy laid his face down on them, inhaling the clean, woolly smell. He had of course never worn them since he came to London--Uncle Henry had not thought it necessary to make any arrangement as to how Rodney should spend his Saturdays--yet the sight of them comforted him. He was beginning to employ that saddest of all philosophies, that nothing can take from us the good times we have had. He had eaten hardly anything all day, and the ache in his throat was well nigh intolerable. His door opened, and the maid announced: “A gentleman to see you, sir. Said he’d come up here.”
Cecil had come before his letter. As the open door betrayed the listless little figure with the scattered flannels the whole situation was revealed to him in a flash, and for the hundredth time in a not over well-spent life he cursed the folly which had rendered him so incapable of helping his friends in any material way. When Rodney realized who was his visitor, he simply flung himself bodily upon him, and Cecil Connop, who was tender-hearted and easily touched, kissed him and had been rapturously kissed in return before he had time to consider whether the boy would be offended or not. Then they both sat on the bed and for the first time for six weeks Rodney chattered. One of the boarders, a girl who did typewriting in Chancery Lane, passing his doorway, stopped and smiled as she heard the ripple of Rodney’s laughter; she waited for a full minute, enjoying the unwonted sound, then passed on to her own room unaccountably cheered. People in that house were too busy and too tired to laugh!
When Cecil Connop got back to his rooms he sat and smoked for a long time before he wrote the following letter to Felicia Felcourt:
“To-night I have spent an hour with Rodney, and find him apparently well and cheerful. I cannot faithfully report upon his appearance, as it was candle-light and I did not see him very distinctly. He talked freely enough about you all at home, about his old school, about myself; but, when I come to think of it, said nothing about his business. You will, I know, pardon me if I ask you in all seriousness--is this necessary? The whole time I was with him I had a curious sense that he was playing truant and ought to be at school; and there is one thing that an expression in your letter impels me to say at the risk of being impertinent: no amount of money in the world is such a possession as the breeding you and his dead father have given your boy. Forgive this frankness and believe me that I feel with you the more keenly that I am so conscious of my own gross impotence to help.”
On Saturdays Rodney left business at one, and on this particular Saturday flew back to “Meck” to change into his “Etons,” when he hied him on the top of an omnibus to lunch with Cecil Connop at his club. When he was seated opposite to his host, that gentleman proceeded to examine him critically. The boy was unmistakably a gentleman: everything about him, from the long slender hands of which he was so unconscious, to the way he looked his companion straight in the eyes, proclaimed him to come of a race who had spent their days otherwise than in tying up parcels. Men passing in and out looked pleasantly at the pretty boy who was so plainly enjoying the unwonted experience; but Cecil noted that he was very thin, that after the first flush of greeting was past the little high-bred face was pale, and that there were black shadows under the long-lashed grey eyes. Moreover, although there was everything for lunch calculated to please a boy, he ate hardly anything.
“Are they decent to you at your place of business?” asked Cecil, carefully pouring cognac into his coffee.
“You see,” said Rodney slowly, “I don’t seem to know anybody....” Then, with a twinkle of amusement, “They call me a fool when I make mistakes, which is pretty often, and if I do things right nobody says anything.”
During the next week or two Cecil made a point of seeing Rodney from time to time, and after each meeting he felt more and more convinced that the boy’s health was failing. He did not complain, but the sedentary life was beginning to tell upon a constitution that had never been so tried. He began to stoop, and even with Cecil his laugh was by no means so ready or so frequent as it had been.
Felicia, although at first much comforted by Cecil’s account of Rodney, longed after him as only widowed woman can long for her son; but she had promised her brother that she would not attempt to see the boy for three months lest it should unsettle him, and it only wanted three weeks of the stipulated time.
Rodney had not seen Cecil for a fortnight; he was out of town, but this Rodney did not know. It was Saturday, and a smell of onion curry pervaded the boarding-house, the Square garden looked hopelessly uninviting, and he felt that he could endure neither the one nor the other a moment longer. So he hied him to Pall Mall to see if he could catch a glimpse of his friend. A conspicuously forlorn little figure, he strolled slowly past the many clubs, when a man coming hastily down some steps stared hard at Rodney, and, fixing his eyeglasses more firmly on his nose, turned and walked swiftly after him.
“Felcourt! Felcourt! What are you doing here?” asked a sharp, nervous voice, and Rodney started violently as his house-master, “Fireworks Fenton,” caught him by the shoulder and shook him.
* * * * *
“You young ass! Why didn’t you write and tell me all about it?” said “Fireworks Fenton” an hour later, as he angrily thumped a tea-table in “Stewart’s” till the cups jumped off their saucers. “We all thought you’d gone to another school, and here have you missed a whole term, and lost flesh and muscle, and forgotten everything you ever knew. I’ve no patience with you; it’s preposterous, and must be put an end to at once! Give me your uncle’s address and your mother’s----” and “Fireworks” glared at Rodney through his eyeglasses, and Rodney sat swallowing uncomfortable things in his throat, while his heart felt lighter than it had been for many a long week. It was so good to be bullied in that particular fashion once more. Now he dared to look forward. He didn’t in the least know how it was to be managed, but his old master had told him he was to come back to school next term, and _he_ always got his own way even with the Head himself. “Fireworks” was not afraid of twenty Uncle Henries--“Worthy but mistaken, worthy but mistaken,” he had muttered more than once during his late pupil’s explanations. Rodney went with him to Paddington to see him off, and it was only as the train steamed out of the station that “Fireworks Fenton” recollected that he had omitted the special business he had come up to town to do. But he only frowned and muttered: “That ridiculous little Felcourt put it out of my head, but I’m glad I found him--glad I found him. What fools these dear women are! What fools! What fools!” and whenever he turned over a sheet of newspaper (of which he didn’t read a line), he frowned again, exclaiming: “What fools!”
The particular fool Mr. Fenton had in his mind found two letters beside her plate on the following Tuesday morning. She knew both the handwritings, and gave a little sigh as she opened that from Rodney’s house-master: it would be to ask how Rodney was getting on: he had always been fond of the boy, and she had told him nothing.
“You will, I hope, acquit me of frivolous interference,” ran the letter, “in matters that do not concern me, when I tell you that I have seen Rodney and heard from him of the very great change it has been necessary to make in his life. I greatly wish that I had known sooner your reasons for taking him away from school, as I think one of the chief obstacles could have been, and still can be, easily removed. Dear Mrs. Felcourt, it is with considerable diffidence that I venture to ask you to do me a great favor, namely, to allow me to undertake Rodney’s education; my one stipulation being that he should come back to my house. You know that where there are twenty to thirty boys, one more or less makes but little difference, and in becoming responsible for the school fees, I am doing no more than my headmaster did for me. My mother was left a widow with five children and very little of this world’s gear. I am fully aware how much I shall be the gainer if you allow me to have Rodney, for, young as he is, he had a distinct influence upon that mysterious and fluctuating commodity, the ‘tone of the house,’ and I have not the slightest doubt that he will be able to make his own way by aid of scholarships, ultimately earning his own living nearly as soon as if he had remained in business.
“Forgive me where I have expressed myself clumsily, and believe me,
“Faithfully yours, “REGINALD FENTON.”
It was a long time before Felicia took up the other letter, which was from Cecil Connop, and of this one sentence stood out in letters of fire to the exclusion of everything else:
“I don’t believe the boy’s health will stand it, Felicia; come and see for yourself.”
Felicia packed her smallest box and went.
When Rodney came back from business that evening Selina, the parlormaid, informed him that a lady was waiting in the drawing-room to see him. Selina, usually so grim, was all “nods and becks and wreathed smiles”; she liked Rodney, though he did “throw about his clothes something shameful.”
He was very tired and his head ached, as it always did in the evening lately, but something in the maid’s tone made him forget his weariness, and he raced up the stairs certain that only one lady could have produced such unwonted geniality on Selina’s part. But he paused on the mat outside the door; suppose it should only be his aunt! She had never come yet, but she might, and how was Selina to know that he did not care particularly for his aunt?
The door opened suddenly from the inside.
“I _knew_ nobody else would come upstairs like that. What were you waiting for, you dear goose?”--and Rodney’s mother inspected her boy for herself.
Next day she went to see her brother at his office, and told him that she had decided to accept Mr. Fenton’s offer. She rather surprised Uncle Henry, she was so decided and so cool; he did not know that Cecil Connop had got up two hours earlier than usual, in order to have plenty of time to fortify Felicia for the interview, only leaving her at the office door.
“Do you think he will refuse to have anything more to do with us?” she had asked timidly.
“He couldn’t be so absurdly unjust,” answered Cecil stoutly; “but, even if he were, you have Rodney to think of. It is a chance in a thousand; it would be worse than madness to throw it away. He’s a square little peg, is Rodney; you’ll never fit him into that hole.”
Uncle Henry gave in quite graciously, though he was not best pleased. Had he but known it, he revenged himself upon Mr. Fenton for his interference by writing him a solemn letter of thanks, in which he spoke of his “generous, nay munificent offer.” “Fireworks Fenton,” very red and uncomfortable, rolled the letter into a ball and dropped it into his waste-paper basket, exclaiming:
“Pompous idiot!”
When Rodney went home his little sisters found him more delightful than ever, but he was reticent as regarded his experiences in London, describing it briefly as “a beastly hole.”
On his return to school “Fireworks Fenton” sent for him the very first evening.
“A row already, Felcourt!” exclaimed his best friend in dismay.
But Rodney ran along the passage and knocked at the study door without any fears on that score. As he closed the door behind him it was the master who looked embarrassed, as he jerked out:
“I’m pleased to see you back, Felcourt. Remember that if you are in any way perplexed, or get into trouble ... or ... do you want any pocket-money, by the way?” and “Fireworks” bent anew over the letter he was writing.
“No, sir, I have the usual pocket-money, thank you; but please I would like to----”
“Now, Felcourt, don’t you see that I’m busy? Go away, go away!”
“But please, sir----”
“I know perfectly well all the absurd and ridiculous things you would say, and I very much prefer that you should not say them. One thing _I_ have to say, attend to your English prose! I have a distinct recollection that your spelling of English is revolting--positively revolting. Attend to it!”
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY MISOGYNIST
What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labors to these Bodleians were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle or profane the leaves, their winding sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.--CHARLES LAMB.
I
Every Easter holidays the schoolmaster went back to Oxford. Head of a flourishing preparatory school in the north, a bachelor, absorbed in his boys, strenuous, matter-of-fact, he yet retained after some twenty years of monotonous grind a romantic affection for the dear city of his youthful dreams.
He always put up at the King’s Arms, that ancient hostel with the undulating floors, where the ale is brown and strong, and the cold beef tender and streaky. On his very first day he hied him to a solitude he loved, paid his modest threepence, and mounted to a favorite haunt of his--the picture-gallery of the Bodleian Library.
It was always empty; it almost always is empty. Undergraduates know it not; artistic and intellectual residents appear to scorn its prosaic portraits of bygone poets and college benefactors, its humble curiosities. Visitors seldom trouble themselves to mount the few extra steps leading to it from the world-famed library below. But the schoolmaster loved to wander up and down the second gallery. He loved the double archway with the traceried roof, where the statue of William, Earl of Pembroke, stands in the centre, and the two wide bay windows are filled with pale stained glass, and one has a deep, comfortable seat.
As usual, the gallery seemed deserted, and the schoolmaster let the peace of its solitude slide into his soul, till his spirit was compassed about with a great calm. He strolled slowly through the gallery, his hands, holding his straw hat, clasped behind him. He always uncovered the instant he entered the little modest door in the corner of the great quadrangle that leads to so many wonders. Presently he reached the archway where he was wont to sit and dream.
With a start of surprise he discovered that it was already tenanted.
Under the portraits of Ben Jonson and Joseph Trapp, curled up in a corner of the deep window-seat, his muddy boots reposing on the sacred oak, was a boy--a small, thin boy in Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, apparently about twelve years old, who read absorbedly a popular illustrated magazine. He never looked up as the schoolmaster approached. Apparently he neither heard his footstep nor realized that the newcomer had paused to stare at him in speechless astonishment.
Amazement, accompanied by extreme annoyance, was the schoolmaster’s predominant emotion. There seemed to him something incongruous to the verge of irreverence in anyone daring to read a modern magazine under the very roof of the building that contained so much of venerable scholarship.
It is true that the boy was perfectly quiet. Beyond the turning of his page, he made no sound of any sort, and the schoolmaster found himself watching this reader with a sort of dreadful fascination. He longed that the child should reach the bottom of his page and look up. He even gave a little cough to attract his attention. But the boy seemed absolutely unconscious of either the stranger’s presence or his scrutiny, and read on unmoved, smiling occasionally at what he read.
The schoolmaster fussed to the end of the gallery, pausing at every window to look out over the roofs at the towers and spires of Oxford. Then he fussed back again along the other side, where the view consists of the grey-walled quadrangle, a veritable “haunt of ancient peace.” The peace that had enveloped him on his first entry spread her wings and fled. Irritation and curiosity had taken her place, and as he reached the archway again he stopped and looked at the motionless little figure in the window.
The boy was no longer reading.
The magazine lay on the window-seat beside him. His knees were drawn up to his chin, his arms clasped about them, and he stared unblinkingly at the portrait of Abraham Cowley on the wall that faced him.
The schoolmaster walked round the statue of William of Pembroke till he, too, faced the boy. This time the child certainly glanced in his direction, but the glance was of the most cursory order, and wholly without interest. In an instant he had returned to his grave contemplation of the poet, and the schoolmaster might himself have been the statue of William of Pembroke for any interest he excited.
The boy was pale and thin-faced, with large, hollow eyes and a tall, wide forehead--a scholar’s forehead, as the schoolmaster, accustomed for years to the observation of boys, had already noted. But what latent scholarship was displayed in the reading of that obnoxious magazine? And what business, the schoolmaster asked himself angrily, had a boy of that age to be boxed up indoors on a fine afternoon in the Easter holidays?
The schoolmaster was a conscientious man in the pursuit of his calling. From the very first he had taught himself to look upon boys as individuals. He loved them; he whole-heartedly wished them well. They were to him of most absorbing interest; but he liked to get away from them sometimes, and nowhere had he been able to pass so completely from his ordinary life of a hundred petty duties and anxieties as in the high solitude of that deserted gallery, set in the very centre of the scenes he held most dear, now spoilt and desecrated by this young interloper with his horrid modern magazine. Why on earth did he choose to come here?
The schoolmaster could bear it no longer. “Boy,” he exclaimed, “why do you come and read here?”
Slowly the boy turned his melancholy eyes upon his questioner. “Because,” he answered, civilly enough, but without any enthusiasm, “it is generally perfectly quiet here.”
There was the faintest perceptible emphasis on the “generally,” not so much impertinent as gently reproving. Having answered, he turned his eyes again upon the chubby, smiling countenance of Abraham Cowley, and silence fell upon them like a pall.
The schoolmaster was baffled, but more curious than ever. He was quite conscious of the implied reproach in the “generally,” and he noted the absence of the courteous “sir” with which any properly constituted boy would conclude a remark made to an elder. But he could not feel that the boy had been willfully rude. He would try again. “May I ask,” he said pleasantly, “why you are so fond of looking at the portrait of Abraham Cowley?”
Again the boy shifted his gaze from the smug charms of the poet to the worn and somewhat homely features of his questioner.
“I like him cos he’s so good-tempered--in this one,” was the brief reply.
The schoolmaster came and stood beside the boy, and looked at the portrait. Above it was another, also by Kneller, but representing him as thin and severe-looking.
“They’re very different, aren’t they?” the schoolmaster remarked. “You’d hardly think they were the same man, would you?”
“I expect,” the boy said solemnly, “in the top one he’s been married.”
This startling supposition fairly took away the schoolmaster’s breath. He racked his brains to remember all he had ever heard or read of Abraham Cowley, and couldn’t for the life of him recollect whether he was married or not. It is not in the nature of a true schoolmaster to leave a youthful mind in the darkness of ignorance if he can be the bearer of a torch whose light may pierce that gloom, so he said: “I expect it was his political troubles that caused so marked a change in his appearance. Do you know anything about him?”
“No, but I like him.”
“Shall I tell you about him?”
“No, thank you,” the boy answered politely, but with firm finality.
He took up his magazine again, opened it, spread it upon his knees, and in one instant was absorbed in its pages.
The schoolmaster sat down on the window-seat and gazed alternately at the boy and at the portraits of Ben Jonson and Joseph Trapp above his head. Since he had been a little boy himself he had never felt so snubbed. He was wholly unaccustomed to be a cypher in the eyes of boys, and suddenly with devastating force there was flung upon him the conviction that he never saw a real boy at all--that the boys he saw were all carefully expurgated editions arranged to suit his sensibilities.
A wild spirit of enterprise seduced the schoolmaster. He felt himself as one who after long sailing in smooth, familiar waters suddenly sights an unknown and precipitous shore.
He had come to Oxford to get away from the boys he thought he knew. What if, at Oxford, he received real enlightenment with regard to a boy he did not know? The sunshine faded and the gallery grew dark. Outside, he heard the soft patter of a heavy April shower.
“You ought not to read in this light,” he said suddenly, “you will hurt your eyes.”
The boy looked up surprised at this fresh interruption, but he obediently closed his book: there is something almost irresistible in the commands of those accustomed to exert authority.
“Do you come here often?” asked the schoolmaster.
“Yes, whenever I’ve got threepence to get in.”
“Has no one ever told you that when you are talking to an older man it is considered polite to say ‘sir’?”
“No. I don’t know many old men, nor men at all, for the matter of that.”
“Why, Oxford is full of men.”
“That may be. I don’t know ’em. I only wish I did.”
The boy spoke bitterly and his eyes were full of gloom.
“Don’t you go to school?” this “older man” asked anxiously.
“No, I’m too delicate, so they say.”
“Who teaches you, then?”
“A guv’ness. I say, do you think we _ought_ to talk here?”
“I see no reason why not. This isn’t the library, there is no notice enforcing silence.”
The boy looked as if he wished there was. He sat perfectly mute, with his eyes fixed on the placid portrait over the schoolmaster’s head.
“Wouldn’t you like to come downstairs with me and see some of the curiosities in the library?” the schoolmaster suggested beguilingly.
“No, thank you.”
Really it was most difficult to make any headway with this boy. But the schoolmaster possessed to the full the necessary perseverance of his craft, so he continued his catechism:
“Do your parents live in Oxford?”
“I haven’t got any parents, they’re dead.”
“Dear me, how sad! With whom do you live, then?”
“Aunts.”
Written words can in nowise express the snappiness with which the boy ejaculated this monosyllable. The schoolmaster felt unaccountably chilled and worsted, and silence fell upon them once more.
The black cloud had passed over the Bodleian, the rain ceased, and the sun shone out again. The boy swung his feet off the window-seat, put on his cap and picked up his magazine, and without a word of farewell, strolled nonchalantly out of the gallery, leaving the schoolmaster to exclaim when he had finally vanished, “Well, of all the curmudgeony boys it has ever been my lot to meet, there goes the most curmudgeony!”
II
Yet he found it difficult to dismiss the ungracious youngster from his thoughts. Next afternoon he sought the gallery again, but there was no little figure curled up in the deep window-seat. The poet Cowley smiled serenely, the gallery was deserted, dignified, reposeful as of yore: with all its mellow charm of faded coloring, that even the luminous stillness of that April afternoon could not burnish into real brightness. But the usual sense of pleasant well-being, and ordered peace, failed to enwrap the soul of the schoolmaster. Even as the day before he had found the presence of the reading figure in the window irritating and incongruous, so to-day he found its absence singularly disturbing. He walked once round the gallery, sat a few minutes looking at the portrait of Cowley and wondering what mysterious charm it held for the queer child who loved it, and so into the dear familiar irregular streets, where he scanned every boy who passed, in the hope of coming across his small acquaintance of the day before. He went every day to the gallery, but no boy was there. He almost gave up hope of ever seeing him again, but he did not forget; and when, eight days after their first meeting, he mounted to the gallery and saw the little figure crouched in the window as before, with a gaily covered magazine open on his knees, the schoolmaster’s heart beat a little faster, and he hurried forward, exclaiming: “Where have you been all these days?”
The boy started at his greeting, looked up, and a smile of recognition changed his face so absolutely that the schoolmaster felt a queer tightening in the muscles of his throat.
“I don’t get my pocket-money till a Friday,” the boy explained. “I couldn’t come before.”
“Well, now you are here, let’s have a chat together,” the schoolmaster said genially. “We both like this place, let’s tell each other the reasons why, and see if they’re the same.”
He sat down beside the boy, just out of reach of the muddy boots. The boy, his magazine still held open on his knees, surveyed his neighbor with dark, mournful eyes. Now that the smile had ceased to lighten his face, the schoolmaster was shocked at the sharpness of the thin cheekbones, the hollows and the blue shadows under the solemn eyes.
“I can’t tell you why I like it,” said the boy, “’cept p’r’aps because it’s so quiet, no one ever talks here, and there’s no women.”
“But women can come here if they like,” the schoolmaster objected.
“They never _do_ like, not when I’m here,” the boy exclaimed eagerly. “I’ve been here every week for months and months and I’ve never seen one.”
“But why do you object to women?” the schoolmaster persisted. “We should be in a poor case without them, most of us.”
“_I_ don’t object to them,” the boy said wearily; “it’s them objects to us, and they do talk so--talk and talk and talk about their sufferings.”
“Sufferings?” the schoolmaster repeated.
“_You_ know,” said the boy impatiently, “women’s sufferings and votes and things, and Parliament and injustice and that.”
“Suffrage, suffrage, you mean suffrage!” cried the schoolmaster.
“It’s all the same, that’s what they talk about, and inferiority and that. One can’t help being born a boy, can one?”
“_Help_ it!” exclaimed the schoolmaster. “Why, who’d be born anything else if they had their choice?”
The boy’s pale cheeks flushed. “Do you really mean that?” he asked eagerly.
“Of course I do. It’s a glorious thing to be a boy who’s going to be a man.”
“_They_ don’t think so, they say it’s much better to be a girl; they’re sorry I’m a boy.”
“Oh, come,” the schoolmaster said chaffingly. “You can’t expect me to believe that. They may say so in a kind of joke, but they don’t really mean it.”
“Do you know my aunts?”
“Well, no; but I expect they are very like other ladies, who often say what they don’t mean.”
The boy gave one scornful glance in the direction of the schoolmaster, lowered his eyes to the printed page, and was instantly absorbed.
The schoolmaster felt that he was dismissed. He had been weighed in the balance, and found wanting in sympathy and insight, a mere stupid looker-on at the outside of things. Five minutes ago the boy had welcomed him. Now, it was as though the child had risen with the royal prerogative, and closed the interview. The schoolmaster sighed deeply.
The boy looked up. His eyes were the color of a still pool in a Devonshire trout stream, brown, with olive-green shadows, suggesting depths unfathomable. The schoolmaster instantly seized upon the small concession, exclaiming: “I came here every day in the hope of seeing you again, and now that you are here, you sit and read. Don’t you think it’s rather unkind?”
The boy flushed hotly, and once more the transforming smile illumined his face as he said: “You came here on purpose to see me? Why?”
“Well, you see, I’ve known a good many boys in my time, and I thought you seemed a bit lonely....”
The hungry eyes devoured him, and the schoolmaster stopped in the middle of his sentence, for, like all Englishmen, he dreaded any manifestation of feeling, and the boy looked as if he were about to cry. His fears were groundless, however, for the child only said: “How many boys have you known?”
“Rather over a thousand, I fancy. You see, it has been my business to have to do with boys for over twenty years.”
“Over a thousand boys--and I don’t know one! How unfair things are, and beastly.”
The boy looked enviously at the grizzled man who had known so many boys; and the man looked pityingly at this boy who seemed to have been somehow cheated of all that makes youth joyous.
“How is it you have no friends of your own age?” he said presently. “Why don’t you beg your aunts to send you to school? You’d probably get stronger directly you got there, with the regular games and busy life.”
“My aunts don’t like schools. They say boys learn to be tyrants and bullies at school.”
“Oh, do they? You couldn’t have fifty tyrants in one place, or they’d be the death of one another, like the Kilkenny cats.”
“My aunts say,” the boy continued, “that I’m to be a result. I won’t be a result. It’s beastly to be a result. I’ll be a policeman when I’m grown up. Just you wait. I’ll stand outside Parliament, and if a woman comes near I’ll carry her to jail. You see if I don’t.”
The boy spoke with such vindictive bitterness that the schoolmaster was shocked.
“I have no doubt,” he said soothingly, “that your aunts have good reasons for many of their views. You cannot possibly judge of such questions for many years to come.”
“You’d judge if you heard it all day long like I do,” the boy retorted. “It’s only here I get away from it. Here in this nice quiet with that fat, contented chap smiling at me; and now you’ve been and made me talk about it, so even _he_ will know. You’ve gone and spoilt my place--it’s too bad.”
The boy looked as if he was really going to cry this time, and the schoolmaster felt dreadfully guilty.
“Tell me about your parents,” he said hastily. “Do you remember them?”
“My father died before I was born, and my mother just after--she always was very unwise.”
“My dear boy, you ought not to speak about your mother like that. You shock me.”
“Well, _they_ say so.”
“If anyone was to say to me that my mother was unwise, I’d--I’d knock him down!” the schoolmaster exclaimed.
“P’r’aps you knew her?”
“Thank God, yes!”
“Ah, I didn’t, you see--and I don’t think I could knock Aunt Amabel down--she’s very strong.”
“Of course not, of course not,” the schoolmaster said hastily. “I never suggested such a thing for a moment. I expect you misunderstand your aunts, and it is possible that they don’t quite understand you.”
The boy said nothing. He no longer stared at Cowley’s portrait. He stared at the schoolmaster, and in his melancholy gaze was concentrated all the bitterness and disappointment of his twelve short years.
“Let us come out and walk by the Cher,” said the schoolmaster.
The boy followed him obediently, and as they turned into Catharine Street, slipped his hand into that of his new acquaintance.
“Twelve years old,” thought that worthy, “and he takes a fellow’s hand. Poor little chap!” Aloud he said: “Boys generally take each other by the arm, you know.”
Instantly his companion seized him by his, and arm in arm they sought the sheltered walk loved well by Joseph Addison.
III
After that they met every day in the quadrangle of the Bodleian by appointment, and together mounted to their favorite seat in the picture-gallery. The boy no longer read a magazine; instead, he asked questions--endless, anxious, exhaustive questions--as to the usual doings and habits of boys who lived with each other and were brought up by men. All his ideas on the subject were gathered from school stories, and in consequence were crude and chimerical in the extreme. It was undoubtedly a shock to him when this kindly friend of his frankly admitted that he had frequently caned boys, and that he was supposed to have “rather a heavy hand.” And the schoolmaster was still more shocked at the bitterness of soul he discovered in this queer, quiet boy. He gathered that the aunts--generally spoken of as “they”--were ladies wholly absorbed in politics and every kind of movement for the emancipation of women, and the schoolmaster pictured them as members of the shrieking sisterhood, ill-favored and ill-dressed, oblivious of the fact that feminine political opinions do not necessarily march in elastic-sided boots. When the boy did condescend to mention one of his aunts by name it was always of “Aunt Amabel” he spoke. She appeared to be the guiding spirit of the trio, busy, strong, and energetic, spending what time she could spare from politics in the pursuit of all those games from which the unfortunate boy was debarred by lack of comrades, and the schoolmaster found himself thinking with quite unusual enthusiasm of the sister who kept house for him. At times he had regretted her exclusively domestic talents. Now he even began to share her serene conviction that women were, on the whole, so much superior to men that only the very foolish could wish to resemble them.
In the course of their long talks the schoolmaster had enlightened his companion as to what constituted, in his simple creed, the whole duty of boy; and so far as his ideals related to honor and courage and truthfulness, he found the child singularly receptive and responsive; but when he touched on the chivalry that should be shown to women, when he tried to arouse the protective instinct that is generally so deeply rooted and spontaneous in even the most rough and tumble average boy, he was met by blank incomprehension, or a veiled hostility that puzzled and depressed him. “If this,” thought he to himself, “is the result of the feminist movement on the rising generation of men, God help the next generation of women!”
The men had come up, and the schoolmaster’s holiday was nearly ended. In two days more he would need to return to his duties in the North, to look after the cricket pitches in the playing-fields, and to see that all was shipshape for the boys’ next term. For the last time he met his sad-faced little friend in Catharine Street. This time they did not go up to the picture-gallery. It was a sunny day in late April, when Oxford seems to burgeon and blossom in a riotous ecstasy of youth and gladness. River and playing-fields were gay with lithe, flannelled figures, and everywhere the air was sweet with the scent of opening lilacs.
“We’ll go on the river this afternoon,” cried the schoolmaster when he spied the little figure waiting for him; “it’s far too fine to be boxed up indoors. I’ll take you in a Canadian canoe. You must sit very still, you know. You don’t think your aunts would mind, do you?”
“They’re in London. Aunt Amabel comes back to-night, but she’ll be off again in a day or two; she’s always going to meetings. I’m jolly glad she’s been away this week; she might have wanted to interfere----”
“I don’t think she would mind your coming out with me, or I wouldn’t take you. You must tell her all about it this evening. I’ll give you my card to show her, and you can explain how we met.”
The boy’s dark eyes were mutinous as he took the proffered card and put it in his pocket, but he said nothing. On the river in the bright sunshine the schoolmaster noticed how very ill he looked, and a great desire possessed this kindly soul to make things easier for the boy. The sight of the black shadows encircling the sombre eyes that should have been so bright with youth and hope decided the schoolmaster to do what he most hated doing--to interfere in another’s affairs, where he had no possible excuse or even reason for so doing.
He walked back with the boy to his home, one of the large, ugly, comfortable houses “standing in its own grounds,” that have sprung up on the outskirts of beautiful old Oxford: a house that looked excessively well-to-do and trim and neat. “Nothing of Mrs. Jellyby here,” thought the schoolmaster.
“Shan’t I see you again?” asked the boy in a husky whisper, as they reached his gate. “It’ll be awful when you’re gone.”
“We’ll see, we’ll see,” the schoolmaster said hastily. “I can’t make an arrangement now. Good-bye, my boy. God bless you!”
The boy’s wistful eyes were more than he could bear. The man turned hastily and walked away, nor once looked back at the watching figure by the gate.
Next morning he called upon Aunt Amabel about ten o’clock. The less conventional the hour, the more possible did he feel it might be to explain his errand. She was at home and would see him. The boy had evidently done his bidding. As he followed the maid from the drawing-room to the study, he prayed that some Pentecostal gift of tongues might be vouchsafed to him.
Aunt Amabel was seated at a large knee-hole table covered with papers. She rose as he came into the room and held out her hand. The business-like table, the litter of papers, was exactly what the schoolmaster had expected, but the lady was wholly unlike the lady of his dreams. Tall, well-dressed, good-looking, and by no means old, she made things harder for him by her welcome. “You are the gentleman who has been so good to Reginald? It is kind of you to call. I am most pleased to meet you. He is a somewhat unusual boy, is he not? We rather pride ourselves on his taste for old buildings, and things that do not generally appeal to boys.”
The schoolmaster mumbled some vague politeness and seated himself upon a chair which faced the knee-hole table. Aunt Amabel’s eyes were dark, like the boy’s, but they were bright and lively, and she turned them now upon her visitor with full inquiring gaze.
“I came,” the schoolmaster said bluntly, “to see you about your nephew. He is not well, and I think his state of health arises largely from the fact that he has no companions of his own age, nor suitable interests. Why don’t you send him to school?”
As he spoke he was perfectly conscious that this self-possessed young woman was misjudging him, and the knowledge made him even less diplomatic than usual.
“We have never considered him strong enough for school life. He is an unusual child of difficult temperament. He would be extremely unhappy at school.”
There was a superior finality in the lady’s tone that roused all the fighting element in the schoolmaster. “He could hardly be more unhappy than he is at present,” he said sharply. “I know that this must appear, as indeed it is, a piece of unwarrantable interference on my part, but, having become really interested in the boy, I could not reconcile it to my conscience to leave Oxford without warning you that if you persist in keeping your nephew away from the natural companionship, amusements, and employments of his age, he will wither away as surely as a plant withers when light and air are withheld from it. That boy will die.”
He shook a thick forefinger at her, and the scorn died out of her eyes. The men who most countenance the woman’s movement are seldom masterful. Aunt Amabel began to like this dictatorial man. It was a new, and not altogether disagreeable, experience to be rated.
“You have a school, haven’t you?” she asked, sweetly.
The schoolmaster’s dun-colored face crimsoned. “My dear young lady,” he answered hotly, “if you imagine that I came to see you because I was touting for another pupil, pray dismiss the idea from your mind.” This time it was Aunt Amabel who blushed. “I came because, knowing a good deal of boys, I feel sure that your nephew is delicate because he is lonely and unoccupied; he is a very boyish boy, a boy who needs the companionship of his own kind. You have an excellent preparatory school quite near here. Try for a term--see what it does for Reginald.”
“To be quite candid,” said Aunt Amabel, “we do not care for the training, mental or moral, that boys receive at the average preparatory school.”
“Try one that’s not average,” he interrupted. “There are plenty of them, all fads and flannel shirts and girls thrown in. He won’t learn anything, but what does that matter? It’s health and youth and gladness that you want for him, and a normal point of view; at present that child’s a perfect misogynist.”
The lady started at the word, and at this critical moment her nephew came into the room. At first he did not see his friend of the Bodleian; when he did he stopped short, looking from his aunt to her visitor with puzzled, timid eyes.
“Reginald,” said Aunt Amabel, “this gentleman says you are lonely and unhappy, and that you would really like to go to school. Is this so?”
“Yes.”
The timid look faded from the boy’s eyes to be replaced by one that was almost stern, so earnest was it.
“Why have you never said anything to me about it? You have never complained.”
“What was the use?”
“But how could we know you were not happy if you never said anything?”
“He knew, without my never saying anything.” The boy pointed at the schoolmaster, who sat with downcast eyes.
“So it appears,” the lady said somewhat tartly, “although you seem to me to have said a good deal. That will do, Reginald; you may go.”
But Reginald did not go. He looked at the schoolmaster, and he looked at his aunt. He took a step forward, exclaiming earnestly: “If you will let me be like other boys, Aunt Amabel, I won’t be a policeman when I’m grown up; I’ll give it up; I’ll truly be something else.” The boy spoke as one who promises to part with some long-cherished and imperishable ideal.
“Oh, child!” exclaimed poor, puzzled Aunt Amabel, “I can’t imagine what you are talking about. _Do_ run away.”
“You see,” said the boy sadly to the schoolmaster, “she never _can_ understand,” and he hastened from the room.
The schoolmaster rose. “Believe me,” he said gently, “I do not want your nephew for a pupil. I’d far rather keep him as a friend--I don’t mean to say that a master can’t be a friend to his boys, but the relationship must necessarily be a little different, and it has been a pleasant experience to come across a boy under quite new circumstances. I wouldn’t spoil it for the world.”
Aunt Amabel looked down, and the schoolmaster noticed that her eyelashes were long and very black. “I am sure you mean kindly,” she said gently, “and you may be sure I shall give every consideration to what you have said.”
When her strange visitor had gone she sat for a long time quite still in front of her table, staring with unseeing eyes at the many papers scattered upon it. She knitted her black eyebrows and thought and thought, but apparently to no purpose, for presently she said to herself: “What _could_ he mean by calling that little boy a misogynist, and what on earth could the child mean about not being a policeman?”
The boy was waiting for the schoolmaster at the gate as he went out. “Well, was it any use?” he cried eagerly.
“My dear chap,” said that gentleman, “you are a little noodle. That’s what you are.”
And the boy, as he trotted by the schoolmaster’s side, found something vaguely comforting in this cryptic speech.