I
I remember the very evening he came to Merivale. “Nubby” Tomkins had a
cold on his chest, so Mathers and I stopped in from the half-hour
“kick-about” in the playground before tea, being chums of Nubby’s.
Whenever he gets a cold on the chest he thinks he is going to die, and
this evening, sitting by the fire in the Fifth’s class-room, he roasted
chestnuts for Mathers and me, and took a very gloomy view of his future
life.
“As you know,” he said, “I hate being out of doors excepting when I can
lie about in hay. And to make me go out walking in all weathers, as they
do here, is simply murder. I know what’ll be the end of it. I shall get
bacilluses or microbes into some important part of me, and die. It’s
like those books the Doctor reads to the kids on Sundays, with
choir-boys in them. The little brutes sing like angels, and their voices
go echoing to the top of cathedrals, and make people blub about in the
pews. Then they get microbes on the chest, and kick. You know the only
thing I can do is to sing; and I shall die as sure as mud.”
Nubby was a corker at singing. He had all the solos in the chapel to
himself, and people came miles to hear him.
“You won’t die,” said Mathers. “You don’t give your money away to the
poor, or help blind people across roads, and all that. Your voice’ll
crack, and you’ll live.”
“I wish it would,” said Nubby; “I should feel a lot safer.”
“Mine,” continued Mathers, “cracked when my mustache came.”
We looked at him as he patted it. Mathers was going next term. He had
more mustache than, at least, two of the under-masters, and once he let
Nubby stroke it, and Nubby said he could feel it distinctly under the
hand.
“That’s what’s done it with M.,” said Nubby, looking at Mathers and
opening another gloomy subject.
Mathers got redder, and began peeling a chestnut.
“I wish I was as certain as you,” he said.
“None of us can be certain,” I said; “but if your voice did go, Nubbs,
you’d be out of the hunt for one.”
“I am,” declared Nubby. “Last time I had a cold in the throat she sent
me a little bunch of grapes by Jane, and a packet of black currant
lozenges; but this time, though the attack is on my chest, and I may
die, she hasn’t sent a thing.”
“Perhaps she doesn’t know.”
“She does. I met her going into the library yesterday, and I doubled up
and barked like a dog, and she never even said she was sorry. It lies
between you two chaps now.”
“I believe you are going strongest just at present,” said Mathers,
critically, to me. “You came off last Wednesday and kicked two goals on
your own, and she said afterwards to Browne that she never saw you play
a bigger game. Then that little beast--Browne, I mean--sniggered, and
made that noise in his throat, like a sprung bat, and said he was quite
glad he hadn’t kept you in. That’s how he shows M. what a gulf there is
even between the Fifth and masters.”
“The bigger the gulf the better,” I said. “It would be rough on a decent
worm to put it second to Browne. In my opinion even a Double-First would
be nothing if he wore salmon-colored ties and elastic-sided boots; and
Browne isn’t a Double-First by long chalks. He can only teach the kids,
and his desk is well known to be crammed with cribs of every kind.”
In the matter of M., I may say at once that she was Milly, Doctor
Denham’s youngest daughter--twelve and a half, fair, blue eyes, and
jolly difficult to please. Somehow the Fifth always drew her most. The
Sixth were feeble beggars at that time. Two of the ten wore spectacles,
and one was going out to Africa as a missionary, and used to treat the
Fifth’s class-room as a sort of training-ground for preaching and doing
good. He was called Fulcher, and the spirit was willing in him, but the
flesh was flabby. We used to assegai him with stumps, and pretend to
scalp him and boil him and eat him. He said he should glory in martyrdom
really; and Nubbs, who knows a good deal about eating, used to write
recipes for cooking Fulcher, and post them to imaginary African kings.
But I should think that to be merely eaten is not martyrdom, properly
speaking. If it is, then everything we eat, down to periwinkles, must be
martyrs; which is absurd, like Euclid says.
Well, it got to be a settled idea at Merivale that M. cared, in a sort
of vague way, for either Nubby, or Mathers, or me, or all of us. The
situation was too uncertain for anything like real jealousy among us;
besides, we were chums, and had no objection to going shares in M.’s
regard. At football Mathers and I fought like demons for Merivale and
for M.’s good word; but any impression we might make was generally swept
away in chapel by Nubby when Sunday came. He could sing, mind you. It
was like cold water down your spine, and all from printed music.
Besides, he could be ill, which gave him a pull over Mathers and me, who
couldn’t. To look at, Nubby was nothing. He had big limbs, but they were
soft as sausages. If you punched him he didn’t bruise yellow and
afterwards black, but merely turned red and then white again. Mathers,
besides being captain of the First Footer eleven, had nigger hair, that
girls always go dotty about, and black eyes, and pretty nearly as much
mustache as eyebrow. As for me, my biceps were the biggest in the lower
school, which isn’t much, of course; but things like that tell with a
girl.
Then it was that conversation turned on Steggles. He was a new boy, due
that afternoon. Hardly had the name passed my lips when the door opened,
and the Doctor’s head appeared. The next moment a chap followed him.
“Ah! there are some of the fellows by the fire,” said the Doctor. “Is
that you, Tomkins? But I needn’t ask.”
“Yes, sir,” said Nubby, rising.
“You are ill-advised, Tomkins, to spend the greater part of your leisure
sitting, as you do, almost upon the hob. A constitutional weakness is
thereby increased. This is Steggles. You will have time for a little
conversation before tea.”
The Doctor disappeared, and Steggles came slowly down the room with his
hands in his pockets. There was nothing to indicate a new boy about him.
He had red rims to his eyes and a spot or two on his face, chiefly near
his nose and on his forehead; his hair was sandy, and he wore a gold
watch-chain.
“You’re called Steggles, aren’t you?” said Nubby, who was an awfully
civil chap in his manners.
“I am.”
“Well, I hope you’ll like Merivale.”
“Do you?”
“All right in summer-time when there’s hay. Hate it when I’m ill, which
I am now.”
“What can you do?” asked Mathers in his abrupt way.
“I can draw,” said Steggles.
“What?”
“Devils.”
“Do one,” said Mathers.
He got a piece of _Cambridge demi_ and a pen and ink. Then Steggles,
evidently anxious to please, sat down, and did as good a devil as ever I
saw. Nubby and I were greatly pleased.
“What else can you do?” said Mathers, as if such a power to draw devils
wasn’t as much as you could expect from one chap.
“I can smoke.”
“Cigarettes? So can anybody.”
“No; a pipe.”
“Oh! where did you learn that?”
“At Harrow.”
Then Steggles started like a guilty thing and put his hand over his
mouth--too late. A rumor we had heard was proved true.
“It would have been sure to get out, and I don’t care who knows it, for
that matter,” said Steggles, defiantly. “I had to leave there because I
didn’t know enough, and couldn’t get up higher in the school. I’m rather
backward through not being properly taught. The teaching at Harrow’s
simply cruel. Not but what I’ve taught myself a thing or two, mind you.
I’m fifteen.”
He looked at us out of his red-rimmed eyes, and put me in mind of a
ferret I’ve got at home. He might have been any age up to twenty, I
thought.
“Can you play anything?” asked Mathers.
“The piano.”
Mathers shivered and Nubby grew excited.
“So can I. We’ll do duets,” he said.
“If you like,” said Steggles.
Then the tea-bell rang.