"Now be off about your business," said Browne, and I went.
That shows pretty well what Mr. Browne was, I should think. The beastly
ingratitude of the man seemed to me the most extraordinary thing that
had ever happened; and after that I never could do right with Browne,
and he sided against me and never would listen to me, even when I had to
tell him things in self-defence.
I could easily show again and again that I was in the right and other
chaps were in the wrong, or masters too, for that matter; but it was not
much good trying to convince people with the whole of them against me.
There was always a proper religious reason for the things I did, and
though sometimes they looked queer until explained, I always could
explain them. But after I got to be hated, nobody would so much as stop
to listen to the explanations--not even the Doctor.
Everybody said he was just and fair, though an old footler; but I know
very well he wasn't, owing to the time when Corkey minimus dropped a
shilling in the playground and I found one there. Well, how could I know
that because Corkey mins. had lost a shilling and I had found one, the
one I had found was bound to be the identical same shilling that Corkey
had lost? I shall always say it was frightfully unfair to me to order
me to give up the shilling as the Doctor did, and then jaw me before the
whole school.
Once my father said to me, "Always act from high motives, Roger," and I
always did; but nobody ever gave me any credit for doing so; and when I
told the Doctor over the affair of Gurney's tame white rabbit, which I
found wandering alone in the playground after dark and killed with a
cricket stump, for fear that it should starve to death, and was seen
doing it by Gurney, who came to look for it--when I told the Doctor I
had done this from the best motives and not because Gurney had taken me
down in class the day before--he said that I was deceiving myself and
told me that Satan had put it into my heart to kill Gurney's rabbit.
Really I had only done it out of fear that a poor dumb creature would
suffer; and yet the Doctor misunderstood me in such a wicked and
spiteful way, that he caned me and made me dig a grave and bury the
brute in front of the whole school as a punishment.
As to my feelings, which are frightfully keen, nobody cares a button
about them and I have to do things, simply in self-defence, that I
should never do if I was treated fairly. Even Tin Lin Chow when he was
here had a better time than me, and I could tell you a lot of things you
wouldn't believe in the matter of tortures, simply invented by Steggles
and others in order to be applied to me. Steggles has invented two sets
of tortures called 'mind tortures' and 'body tortures'; and the mind
tortures are babyish, but the body tortures are well worth avoiding. So
I always pretend the mind tortures are the worst, whereas really only a
fool would care for them, as they mean nothing to anybody who is
religious.
But what I meant to tell you was a fair case of the sort of things that
happen to me and I have to endure. I was told that I was to be tried by
court-martial, and I said "Why?" and Trelawny, the champion fighter of
the school, put the case before me.