Elated by your curiosity we now leave Neil for a moment (say, searching
with his foot for a clean shirt among a pile of clothing on the floor),
mount to the next landing and enter the second room on the left, the
tenant of which immediately dives beneath his table under the impression
that we are a fag-master shouting “Boy.” We drag him out and present him
to you as W. W. Daly. He is five feet one, biceps 7¾, and would probably
kick the beam at about 6½ stone. He is not yet celebrated for anything
except for being able to stick pins into his arm up to the head;
otherwise a creature of small account who, but for Neil’s patronage,
would never have risen to the distinction of being written about, except
perhaps by his mother.
W. W.’s first contact with school was made dark by a strange infirmity,
an incapacity to remember the Latin equivalent for the word “bell.” Many
Latin words were as familiar to him as his socks (perhaps even more so,
for he often wears the socks of others), and those words he would give
you on demand with the brightness of a boy eager to oblige; but daily
did his tutor insist (like one who will have nothing for breakfast but
eggs and bacon) on having “bell” alone. Daily was W. W. floored.
It is now that Neil appears with his sunny offer of Help. He took up the
case so warmly that he entirely neglected his own studies, which is one
of his failings. True he charged threepence (which we shall henceforth
write as 3_d._, as it is so sure to come often into these chronicles),
but this detracts little from his grandeur, for the mere apparatus
required cost him what he calls a bob.
His first procedure was to affix to the bell-pull a card bearing in bold
letters the device “Tintinnabulum.” This seems simple but was
complicated by there being no bell in W. W.’s room. Neil bought a bell
(W. W. being “stony”), and round the walls he constructed a gigantic
contrivance of wire and empty ginger-beer bottles, culminating at one
end in the bell and at the other end in W. W.’s foot as he lay abed. The
calculation, a well-founded one, was that if the sleeper tossed
restlessly the bell would ring and he would awake. He was then, as
instructed by Neil, first, to lie still but as alert as if visited by a
ghost, and to think hard for the word. If, however, it still eluded him
he was to turn upon it the electric torch, kept beneath his pillow for
this purpose and borrowed at 1_d._ per week from Dolman mi., spot the
tricky “Tintinnabulum” in its lair and say the word over to himself a
number of times before returning to his slumbers, something attempted,
something done to earn a night’s repose.
All this did W. W. conscientiously do, and if there was delay in
bringing Tintinnabulum to heel the fault was not that of Neil, but
of inferior youths who used to substitute cards inscribed
“Honorificabilitudinitatibus,” “Porringer,” “Xylobalsamum,”
“Beelzebobulus,” and other likely words.
Eventually he achieved; a hard-won ribbon for his benefactor whom we are
about to call Neil for the last time.
There was a feeling among those who had betted on the result that it
should be celebrated in no uncertain manner, and a dinner with speeches
not being feasible (though undoubtedly he would have liked it), he was
re-christened Tintinnabulum, and the name stuck.
So Tintinnabulum let it be henceforth in these wandering pages. Neil the
disinherited may be pictured pattering back to me on his naked soles and
knocking me up in the night.
“Neil,” I cry (in dressing gown and a candle), “what has happened? Have
you run away from school?”
“Rather not,” says the plaintive ghost, shivering closer to the fire, “I
was kicked out.”
“By your tutor?” I ask blanching.
“No, by Tintinnabulum. He is becoming such a swell among the juniors
that he despises me and the old times. And now he has kicked me out.”
“Drink this hot milk, Neil, and tell me more. What are those articles
you are hugging beneath your pyjamas?”
“They are the Bruiser Belt and the score against Juddy’s. He threw them
out after me.”
“Don’t take it so much to heart, Neil. I’ll find an honoured place for
them here, and you and I will have many a cosy talk by the fire about
Tintinnabulum.”
“I don’t want to talk about him,” he says, his hands so cold that he
spills the milk, “I would rather talk about the days before there was
him.”
Well, perhaps that was what I meant.
Cruel Tintinnabulum.