BY L. ALLEN HARKER
THE VAGARIES OF TOD AND PETER
THE REALLY ROMANTIC AGE
THE BRIDGE ACROSS
MONTAGU WYCHERLY
ALLEGRA
CHILDREN OF THE DEAR COTSWOLDS
JAN AND HER JOB
THE FFOLLIOTS OF REDMARLEY
MISS ESPERANCE AND MR. WYCHERLY
MR. WYCHERLY’S WARDS
MASTER AND MAID
CONCERNING PAUL AND FIAMMETTA
A ROMANCE OF THE NURSERY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
THE VAGARIES
OF TOD AND PETER
THE VAGARIES
OF TOD AND PETER
BY
L. ALLEN HARKER
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1923
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Printed in the United States of America
Published September, 1923
[Illustration]
TO
MARGARET GWENELIN WATSON
WITH LOVE AND HIGH HOPES FOR
HER FUTURE
FOREWORD
A small boy coming down to the drawing-room at half-past five for the
sacred hour of play, found a visitor absorbing his mother’s attention.
For five minutes or so he politely refrained from interrupting their
conversation, and he wandered about the room, a little disconsolate
perhaps, but in that state of being described by nurses as “not a bit
of trouble.” When, however, the five minutes lengthened into ten, he
felt that direct action of some sort was imperative. So he advanced
upon the lingering guest, laid small, imperative hands upon her knee;
and lifting an anxious face to hers, enquired in honeyed tones: “Is you
going to stay very much longer?”
That was in the forgotten, by some regretted, by many derided, nineties.
The other day I was having tea with a charming friend, wise mother of
many sons, when the youngest, aged two, came for the sacred hour. It
was pleasant in that drawing-room and I made no haste to go. Whereupon
he came to me and, with a gracious, even a gallant, gesture, held out
his hand to me with the utmost friendliness, conversing the while
perpetually and emphatically in a manner difficult for the uninitiated
to follow. Pleased and flattered, I took the kind little hand, which
pulled me to my feet. He then firmly led me to the door and out to the
top of the staircase, and was preparing to escort me downstairs and to
the front door, when his mother ran after us and fetched us back.
Whatever else is changing in the present; bewildering world, there is
one section of the community that is essentially Conservative, not to
say “Die Hard.”
Outside my window there is a long, straggling street of old cottages
which have altered very little since the fourteenth century, and in
those little old houses dwell many children who play in the street,
games that were doubtless popular “in Thebes’s streets three thousand
years ago.”
The adult attitude towards children has changed even during the last
fifty years, and largely for the better. Yet the child’s attitude
towards his playmate, and even towards the omniscient grown-up, is
fundamentally what it has been throughout the ages.
The early nineteenth century is often quoted by deprecators of the
twentieth as a time when the attitude of youth towards age was
particularly praiseworthy in its modesty and reverence. Such people,
who are perhaps a little prone to forget their own youthful viewpoint,
tell us that in those golden days children accepted without question
the opinions of those who were set in authority over them, and were
almost invariably obedient, contented and unenterprising. Yet,
researches in the literature published especially for children by
that “friend of youth,” John Newbery, at “the corner of St. Paul’s
Churchyard,” in his little “gilt books”--most of them published
between 1745 and 1802--prove that badly-behaved children were by no
means uncommon, and that over-indulgent parents were not unknown. In
the “Histories of More Children than One; or, Goodness Better than
Beauty,” Master John and Miss Mary Strictum, who, as their names imply,
are models of deportment, are unfavorably contrasted with Master Thomas
and Miss Kitty Bloomer.
Thomas insists upon his papa’s horse being brought into the parlour for
him to ride round the room. His mamma tried “to persuade him not to
want it, but he would have his own way.”
“Thomas was much pleased to have it, but Kitty was afraid of it and did
not like that it should stay. She therefore began to scream and beg it
might go out. ‘Pray take it out!’ said she. ‘It shall go out; it shan’t
stay.’
“‘It shan’t go out. It shall stay!’ said her brother.
“They made such a noise that they frightened the horse, and he began to
kick and prance,” and all manner of disasters followed. Not even the
most weak-minded modern parent could go further than this in the way of
indulgence.
Even in so didactic a work as “The First Principles of Religion and
the _Existence of a Deity Explained in a Series of Dialogues Adapted
to the Capacity of the Infant Mind_,” you will find a child as human
and engaging as any infant born since the Armistice. In this work
the particular infant selected for enlightenment is one Maria, made
after no formal pattern. Throughout the long and deadly dialogues her
nimble mind outpaces mamma’s ponderous aphorisms. As, when that lady
discourses on the awful consequences of taking God’s name in vain,
Maria demands demurely: “But would it not be politer and prettier to
say either Mr. or Mrs., and not plain God?”
Again, when her mother, as an example of the evils of slyness, relates
how “the two Misses Quick had pincushions of the same make, but Miss
Betty’s was larger than Miss Sally’s,” and Miss Sally by a subterfuge
manages to exchange her own for her sister’s, Maria says thoughtfully:
“Do you think then, Mamma, that it signifies to God which of the Miss
Quicks had the larger pincushion?”
Could the most recent Realist ask a more searching question?
At Christmas time the papers seemed full of descriptions of _blasé_
children who insisted on going to expensive shops to choose their own
presents, who scoffed at fairies or Santa Claus, and scouted the idea
of any sort of childlike party. I do not move in plutocratic circles,
so I cannot vouch for either the truth or falsehood of these dismal
revelations. But I do know that the vast majority of gently-bred
children born before and during the years that followed 1914 are
easily pleased, and are grateful for very small mercies in the way
of amusement, because nothing else is possible to the greater part
of the upper middle class for financial reasons. And no one who, in
recent years, has been to “Peter Pan” and looked round the crowded
theatre gloriously garlanded with chubby, rosy faces, and heard the
full-throated affirmative that greets the question “Do you believe in
fairies?” can doubt that children are still pretty sound on subjects of
that sort.
This being so, is it incredibly bold or superlatively simple, on my
part, to have ventured to collect into a little sheaf some fugitive
sketches of the kind of children I have known during the last
twenty-five years?
Perhaps it is, and that being so, I can only quote the lines in which
Mr. Kipling has once and for all time summed up the humble plea of the
free-lance:
When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre,
He’d ’eard men sing by land an’ sea;
An’ what he thought ’e might require,
’E went an’ took--the same as me!
CIRENCESTER
1923
CONTENTS
PAGE
FOREWORD vii
PART I--BOYS
THE VAGARIES OF TOD AND PETER 1
“TONY” 56
A SQUARE PEG 64
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY MISOGYNIST 79
PART II--CHILDREN OF LAST CENTURY
A SMALL EVENT 105
IN DURANCE VILE 126
THE SURRENDER OF LADY GRIZELL 134
A CLEAN PACK 144
AN IRON SEAT 152
LÉON 160
THE OLD RELIGION 168
COMRADES 177
LITTLE SHOES 184
“PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMEN” 189
A THROW BACK 197
THE INTERVENTION OF THE DUKE 207
PART III--CHILDREN OF THIS
JEAN, A PORTRAIT 253
THE DOLL’S-HOUSE FLAGS (1917) 264
CONCERNING CHRIS AND EASTER (1916) 280
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.