Now Browne took my class, which is the lowest in the school, and I am
seventh in it. And I gradually got to hate Browne, because Bradwell did,
and for other reesons of my own to. Browne was said to be only
twenty-two, and he looked younger than many of the chaps, his moustashe
being whitish and invisibel to the eye. He wore necktyes which I
remember hearing Mathers say were an insult to nature, and would have
made a rainbow curl up and faint. We always noticed, at arithmetic
times, that Browne, if he got a stumper, would put up the lid of his
private desk and hide behind it--of course, looking the thing up in his
crib. Then he would wander round, as if by accident, to the chap and do
the sum off quick while he remembered it. Bradwell always hated him; and
when he found that Browne was very friendly with Mabel and Mabel was
very friendly with Browne, he hated him far, far wurse.
Bradwell and this girl had a row in the shrubbery at the back of the
chapel, and I, being in the gardener’s potting-shed at the time, feeding
a cattipiller of mine, heard it. Bradwell said:
“I’m not blind, Mabel, I’ve seen it going on ever since last term. You
read his beastly books, and leave rosebuds with scented verbena leaves
round them in that stone urn at the gate when he comes down from his
house to class.”
And she said:
“And why shouldn’t I? You must remember, please, that I am my own
mistress. Besides, the intelligents of a grown-up man is very
refreshing.”
For some reason Bradwell didn’t like this. His voice squeaked up into
his head in a rather rum way when he answered:
“D’you call _him_ a man? He hasn’t got a muscle on him; and he doesn’t
know more than enough to teach the kids.”
“That’s merely mean jellousy,” said Mabel. “Of course, he doesn’t talk
to _you_, or show you what is in him. But he tells me all about his
secret life, and very butiful it is. He is a jenius, in fact.”
“If it comes to that, what can he do?” said Bradwell, awfully clevverly.
“Can he draw?”
“No, he doesn’t draw.”
“Oh! can he sing?”
“No.”
“Can he play the piano?”
“No.”
Now all of these things Bradwell could do to perfecksun, so he got
cheerfuller and cheerfuller.
“What _can_ he do, then, besides jaw the kids and always sneak to the
Doctor?”
“I never saw such jellousy as this,” said Mabel; “but if you must know
I’ll tell you what he can do: he can write poetry out of his own head,
and he has got a solid book of it reddy to print some day--there!”
I suppose Bradwell couldn’t write poetry. Anyway, he got very down in
the face at this. He didn’t say anything--appeering to be frightfully
shocked at what he’d heard. Then Mabel said:
“When you can quote Browning and Byron and Shelley, and write poems
yourself, it will be soon enough to sneer at Mr. Browne.”
“You love him,” said Bradwell, in a very tragik voice.
“I don’t love anybody but my own family,” said Mabel; “but I admire him,
and I admire his poetry, which is very much out of the common indeed.”
“It’s all over then, I suppose,” said Bradwell.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she replied to him. “A thing that has
never begun can’t be all over”; which words of Mabel’s seemed to knock
the heart out of Bradwell.
Then the gardener came along, and I didn’t hear anything else. Of corse,
I couldn’t _help_ hearing what I had done, though I tried hard not to,
and kept feeding my catterpeller like anything all the time.
Two days after I had to carry another note to Mabel, and found one
waiting for Bradwell in the usual place; so they must have made it up.
Then came the beginning of my misforchunes with Browne. He found the
snake appeering to Sulla in my Latin grammar, and called me up and said
he knew very well I hadn’t drawn it myself, but wanted to know who had.
He said it was wrong to the Doctor to ruin our books, and that he had
seen in several different books the same snake, evidently done by the
same boy, owing to them being so much similar.
But the very identical thing had happened in another class--to Steggles,
Bradwell having drawn him the same picture; and knowing what Steggles
said, being a chap who is frightfully cunning, I said the same now to
Browne. I said I left the book on my desk, and somebody came along and
done it while I was out of the room. Browne seemed inclined not to
believe this. Anyway, he took the Latin grammar away with him. But I
heard no more about it till the next evening, when I wanted the book in
prep. Remembering Browne had it, I went off to his study and knocked and
walked in.
Browne wasn’t there for the moment, and the room was empty. I took the
opportunity to look at a rather butiful tobacco-jar of Browne’s which I
have seen at a distance on his mantlepiece many times. Passing his table
to get to it, I chanced to glance there, and juge of my surprise when
the first words I saw at the top of a big sheet of paper were, "To
Mabel"! Underneeth was a lot of writing, and the whole table seemed to
be littered with paper covered with small bits of separate writing, much
of it scratched out and done over again. But the piece with “To Mabel”
at the top was all butiful and clean, without anything scratched, being,
I suppose, the result of all the other bits put together and neetly
copied out.
Well, there I was with my duty towards Bradwell as his fag. Browne had
evidently done a verse out of his own head for Mabel Dunston, and had
written it in this butiful style, on thick white paper, to send to her.
I felt if she got it, knowing what she’d said to Bradwell about Browne,
that it was certin she would abbandon Bradwell, him not being any good
at poems. I wouldn’t have done it for anybody else in the world _but_
Bradwell; I wouldn’t have done it at all if I had known what the end of
it was going to be; but, anyway, at the time it seemed to me, as
Bradwell s fag, I ought to do it; so I did.
I took the poem and rolled it up so as not to hurt it, and hooked off to
Bradwell. He was in his study, and Trelawny, who shares it with him,
being out of the room, I was able to explain. I said:
“If you please, Bradwell, I’ve come from Mr. Browne’s study, and he was
not there, and happening by a curious axcident to glance on the table I
saw this. Knowing about you and Mabel, and being your fag, I took it.”
“Took what?” said Bradwell.