I believe Gideon was the only Jew that ever came to Dunston’s, and I
expect, taking it all round, he might have had a better time at a school
for Jews in general; though in one way he wouldn’t have done as well,
and wouldn’t have had the adventure with old Grimbal, which turned out
so splendidly for him when old Grimbal died.
Though easily the richest chap at Merivale, and getting no less than ten
shillings a week pocket-money, Gideon was so awfully fond of coin that
he hardly spent a penny, and the only thing he did with his money was to
lend it to fellows. He didn’t lend it for nothing, having a curious
system by which you paid in marbles, or bats, or knives for the money,
and, in spite of that, still had to pay back the money itself after a
certain time. You signed a paper, and Gideon said that if chaps hadn’t
paid back the tin on the dates named it would be very serious for them.
But it got serious for him after a bit, because Steggles, who knew quite
as much about money as Gideon (though he never had any), borrowed a
whole pound once, and promised to pay five shillings for it for one
term; and Gideon was new to Steggles then, and agreed. But when the time
of payment came, Steggles said that Gideon had better regard it as a bad
debt, because he wasn’t going to pay back even the original pound. Then
Gideon thought a bit, and asked him why, and Steggles told him. He said:
“Because you know jolly well the Doctor doesn’t allow chaps to lend
money.”
And Gideon said:
“This is the first time I’ve heard that.”
“Anyway, it’s usury, which is a crime,” said Steggles, “and I’m not
going to pay anything; and, being less than twenty-one, you can’t make
me; so it amounts to a bad debt, as I told you just now. You’ve done
jolly well, one way and another, and you’ve got two bats, and Lord knows
how many india-rubber-balls, and cricket-balls, and silver pencils, and
knives out of it, including Ashby minor’s watch-chain, which is silver;
and if you take my tip you’ll keep quiet, because once all these kids
get to know anybody under twenty-one can borrow money without returning
it, then it’s all up with your beastly financial schemes.”
Gideon was remarkably surprised to know what a lot Steggles had found
out about him, and accused him of looking into his play-chest; and
Steggles said he had. Then Gideon went; and about three chaps who had
heard the talk told others, and they told still more chaps, until,
finally, a good many fellows who owed Gideon money felt there was no
hurry about paying it back till it happened to be convenient. In fact,
Gideon jolly soon saw he couldn’t do any more good for himself like
that, and at the beginning of the next term, when chaps were pretty
flush of coin, he wrote up in the gym, “There will be a sale of bats,
knives, and other various useful articles, between two and three
o’clock, by auction, on Tuesday.--J. GIDEON.”
Somebody tore it down, but not before most fellows had read it; and when
Gideon and young Miller, who had a bat in the auction, and hoped to get
it back if possible, were seen carrying Gideon’s play-chest to the gym
after dinner on the appointed day, of course we went. It passed off very
well for Gideon, because the things were really good, and often almost
new. He seemed to know all about auctions, and hit the chest with a
stump, and explained the things, and what good points they had about
them. He only took money down, and I will say nobody could have done it
fairer. If a knife had a broken blade, for instance, or a bat was
slightly sprung, which happened with one, he always pointed it out, so
that nobody could say he had been choused over it. Young Miller got back
his bat for four shillings and eightpence; and Ashby minor got back his
silver chain for thirteen shillings; but it wasn’t much good to him,
because, in order to raise the thirteen bob, he had to raffle the chain
at once, at shilling shares; and he took one, hoping to be lucky, but he
wasn’t, Fowle unfortunately getting it. Gideon told me afterwards that
the sale came out fairly, but not quite what he had hoped. He rather
sneered at the Dunston chaps in general, and said they were a
poverty-stricken crew; which got me into a bate, and I told him that I’d
sooner be the son of an officer in the Royal Navy, which I am, than the
biggest Jew diamond dealer in the world, his father being in that
profession. He said there was no accounting for tastes, but he should
have thought that a man who could deliberately go and be a sailor must
be weak in the head. Then I punched him, and he instantly went down and
apologized. I may mention that I am Bray, the cock of the Lower School.
Before coming to Gideon’s front tooth, just to let you know exactly the
chap he was, I’ll mention another thing he did. An old woman was allowed
to bring up fruit and tuck generally, and sell it to us after morning
school. Steggles, who knows the reason for pretty nearly everything,
said this was permitted by Doctor Dunston to take the edge off our
appetites; but anyway, the old woman sold strawberries and raspberries
in summer-time, and these were arranged with cabbage-leaves in little
wicker baskets at about fourpence each. Well, one day Gideon, who never
refused to eat fruit if offered it, but very seldom bought any, asked
the old woman what she gave for the wicker baskets, and she said
threepence a dozen. Then he asked her what she would give for those
which had been used once, and she thought, and said they would be worth
at least three halfpence a dozen to her. He didn’t say any more, but
after that it was a rum thing how all the used baskets, which generally
were seen kicking about the playground in shoals, disappeared. Nobody
noticed it at the time, but afterwards we remembered clearly that they
_had_ disappeared. And just at the end of the term a chap, hurrying in
late after the bell rang, came bang on Gideon and the old woman round a
corner out of sight of the gates. And the chap saw Gideon give her a
pile of baskets and get three halfpence. Of course, it was the last
three halfpence he ever got that way, because when it became known the
chaps rendered their baskets useless for commerce in many ways. And
Barlow called Gideon “Shylock minor” when he heard that he’d made two
shillings and fivepence halfpenny; which name stuck to Gideon forever.
And Steggles got nine other chaps to subscribe a penny each and buy a
pound of flesh from a butcher’s shop, because in Shakespeare Shylock was
death on his pound of flesh. The pound was put under Gideon’s pillow by
Steggles himself, and when Gideon shoved his watch under his pillow,
which he always did at night, he found it; and Steggles says he turned
pale, but read what was pinned on the pound of flesh, and then smiled
and wrapped the meat up in a letter from home, and said: “What fools you
chaps are, wasting money like that! But it looks all right, and will
mean a good feed for nothing.”
Next day he got up very early and took his pound of flesh down to the
kitchen and got them to cook it; and he ate about half before breakfast
and had the rest cold in his desk during Monsieur Michel’s lesson, which
was a safe time. And Steggles said we ought to have gone one better and
put poison on it.
The great affair of the tooth came on at the beginning of next term; and
first I must tell you that next door to Dunston’s lived an old man, so
frightfully ancient that his skin was all shrivelled over his bones. He
didn’t like boys much, but he would look over his garden-wall sometimes
into our playground and scowl if anybody caught his eye. Various things,
of course, went over the wall often, and it was one of the excitements
of Dunston’s to go into old Grimbal’s garden and get them back. Twice
only he caught a chap, and both times, despite his awful age and
yellowness of skin, he thrashed the chap very fairly hard with a
walking-stick; but he never reported anybody to Dunston, and it was
generally thought he regarded it as a sort of sport hunting for chaps in
his garden. Of course, in fair, open hunting he hadn’t a chance, and the
two he did catch he got by stealth, hiding behind bushes on a rather
dark evening.
Well, the facts would never have been known about this tooth but for
Gideon’s mean spirit. It happened to be necessary for him to fight me,
and though not caring much about it, he couldn’t help himself. Besides,
though the champion of the Lower School, I was tons smaller than Gideon,
and Gideon didn’t know till after the fight that I was a champion, the
true facts about my greatness being hid from him.
Just before the fight Gideon said: “Oh! my tooth, by the way. It may be
hurt, and it cost my father five guineas.” So, to our great interest he
unscrewed one of his two top front teeth and gave it to his second. You
couldn’t have told it was a sham, so remarkably was it done, and it
screwed on to the foundation of the original tooth much like a spike
screws into the sole of a cricket-boot. Gideon had fallen down-stairs
when he was ten and knocked off half the tooth, so he told us; but
Murray, who is well up in science, said that all Jews’ front teeth are
rather rocky, because in feudal times they were pulled out with pincers
as a form of torture, and to make the Jews give up their secret
treasures. Murray said that after many generations of pulling out Nature
got sick of it, and that in modern times the front teeth of Jews aren’t
worth talking about. Murray is full of rum ideas like that, and he hopes
to go in for engineering, having already many secret inventions waiting
to be patented.
As to Gideon, I licked him rather badly in two rounds and a half. Then
he was mopped up and dressed, and screwed in his front tooth again with
the greatest ease.
Once it got known about this tooth, and fellows were naturally excited.
Steggles said it was on the principle of a tobacco-pipe mouthpiece; and,
finding the chaps were keen to see it, Gideon let it be generally known
he would freely show it to anybody for threepence a time, and to friends
for twopence. But this was a safe reduction to make, because, properly
speaking, he hadn’t any friends. Seeing there were nearly 200 boys at
Dunston’s, and that certainly half, including several fellows from the
Sixth, took a pleasure in seeing the tooth, and didn’t mind the rather
high charge, Gideon did jolly well; and in the case of Nubby Tomkins, he
made actually one shilling and threepence; because the tooth had a most
peculiar fascination for Nubby, and he saw it no less than five times.
After that Gideon made a reduction to him, as well he might. But somehow
Slade, the head of the school, was very averse to Gideon’s front tooth
when he heard about it, and he decided that there must be no more
exhibitions of it for money. He told Gideon so himself.
However, a new boy came a week afterwards and heard about the
strangeness of the tooth, and offered a shilling, in three instalments,
to see it; which was too much temptation for Gideon, and he showed it,
contrary to what Slade had said.
Slade, of course, heard, for the new boy happened to be his own cousin,
though called Saunders; and then there was a curious scene in the
playground, which I fortunately saw. Slade came up to Gideon in the very
quiet way he has, and asked him in a perfectly gentlemanly voice for his
front tooth. At first Gideon seemed inclined not to give it up, but he
saw what an awfully serious thing that would be, and finally unscrewed
it, though not willingly.
“Now,” said Slade, “I’ll have no more of this penny peep-show business
at Merivale. I told you once, and you have disobeyed me. So there’s an
end of your beastly tooth. What’s this?”
He took something out of his pocket.
“It’s a catapult,” said Gideon.
“It is,” said Slade, “and I’m going to use your tooth instead of a
bullet, and fire it into space.”
“It cost five guineas,” said Gideon.
“Don’t care if it cost a hundred,” answered Slade, still in a very
gentlemanly sort of way. “We can’t have this sort of thing here, you
know.”
Slade was just going to fire into space, as he had said, when a robin
suddenly settled within thirty yards of us, on the wall between the
playground and old Grimbal’s. Slade being a wonderful shot with a
catapult (having once shot a wood-pigeon), suddenly fired at the robin,
and only missed it by about four inches. He said the shape of a front
tooth was very unfavorable for shooting. But, anyway, the tooth went
over into Grimbal’s, and we distinctly heard it hit against the side of
his house.
Then Slade went away, and we rotted Gideon rather, because not having
the tooth looked rum, and made a difference in his voice. He took it
very quietly, and said he rather thought his father would be able to
summon Slade; and before evening school, having marked down the spot
where he fancied his tooth had hit Grimbal’s house, he went to look with
a box of matches. What happened afterwards he told us frankly; and it
was certainly true, because, with all his faults, Gideon never lied to
anybody.
“I went quietly over, and began carefully looking along the bottom of
the wall, using a match to every foot or so,” he said, "and I had done
about half when I heard a door open. I then hooked it, and ran almost on
to old Grimbal. He had not opened the door at all, but was coming up the
garden path at the critical moment. Of course, he caught me. He was
going to rub it into me with his stick, when I said I should think it
very kind if he would hear me first, as I had a perfectly good excuse
for being there.
"He said:
"‘What excuse can you have for trespassing in my garden, you little oily
wretch?’
"‘Oily wretch’ was what he called me; and I said that my tooth had been
fired into his garden that very day, about half-past one, by a chap with
a catapult; and I lighted a match and showed him it was missing.
"He said:
"‘How the deuce are you going to find a tooth in a garden this size?’
And I told him I had marked it down very carefully, and that it had cost
five guineas, and that I rather believed my father would be able to
summon the chap who had shot it away. He seemed a good deal interested,
and said he thought very likely he might, if it was robbery with
violence. Then he asked me if I was the boy he had seen beating down the
price of a purse at Wilkinson’s in Merivale, and I said I was. Then he
said, ‘Come in and have a bit of cake, boy’; and I went in and had a bit
of cake, and saw on a shelf in his room about fifty or sixty
cricket-balls, and various things which he has collared when they went
over. He asked me a lot of questions about different things, and I
answered them. All he said was about money. He also asked me to be good
enough to value the things he had, which came over the wall from time to
time; and I did, and he thanked me. They were worth fifteen shillings
and tenpence; and Wright’s ball, which everybody thought was stolen by
the milkman, wasn’t, for old Grimbal’s got it; and the milkman should be
told and apologized to.
"Well, he knew a lot about money, and told me he had thousands of golden
sovereigns, which he makes breed into thousands more.
"He said:
"‘You’re the only boy I ever met with a grain of sense in his head. Now,
if I gave you a check on my bankers in Merivale for five pounds to-day,
and wrote to you to-morrow morning to say I had changed my mind, what
would you do?’
“I said, ‘It would be too late, sir, because your check would have been
sent off to my father that very night, to put out at interest for me.’
He said, ‘That’s right. Never give back money, or anything.’ Then he
asked me my name, and told me I might come back to-morrow and look for
my tooth by daylight.”
That was Gideon’s most peculiar adventure, and, though he never found
the tooth or saw old Grimbal again, yet about seven or eight months
afterwards, when old Grimbal was discovered all curiously twisted up and
dead in bed by the man who took him his breakfast, the result of
Gideon’s visit to him came out. Old Grimbal had specially put him into
his will by some legal method, and Doctor Dunston had Gideon into his
study three days after old Grimbal kicked. It then was proved that old
Grimbal had left Gideon all the things that came over the wall, and also
a legacy of fifty pounds in money, because, according to the bit of the
will which the Doctor read to Gideon out of a lawyer’s letter, he was
the only boy old Grimbal had ever met with who showed any intelligence
above that of the anthropoid ape.
Gideon returned all the balls and things to their owners free of charge,
but not until the rightful owners proved they were so. And the money he
sent to his father; and his father, he told me afterwards, was so jolly
pleased about the whole affair that he added nine hundred and fifty
pounds to old Grimbal’s fifty. Therefore, by shooting Gideon’s front
tooth at a robin, Slade was actually putting the enormous sum of one
thousand pounds into Gideon’s pocket, which I should think was about the
rummest thing that ever happened in the world.
Gideon stopped at Dunston’s one term after that. Then he went away, and,
I believe, began to help his father to sell diamonds. He was fairly good
at French, and very at German; but of other things he knew rather
little, except arithmetic, and his was the most beautiful arithmetic
which had ever been done at Merivale; for I heard Stokes, who was a
seventeenth wrangler in his time, tell the Doctor so.