‘HAS SOME ENEMY ATTACKED US?’ SHE ASKED. ‘NO!’ WILLIAM ASSURED HER THROUGH THE TRUMPET.
He watched her blocking up every available entrance to her cottage and wondered desperately how on earth he was going to get out of it. He wished to goodness that he’d never come in – that he’d let Douglas get his own silly tie. The waits outside were chanting as merrily and discordantly as ever.
Suddenly Aunt Jane left the room to reappear triumphantly a few minutes later carrying a large and old-fashioned gun.
‘It’s a long time since I used it,’ she said, ‘but I believe it might get one or two of them.’
William’s annoyance turned to dismay.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t. I – er – wouldn’t,’ he protested.
She could not hear what he said, but seeing his lips move she presented him with the other end of her ear-trumpet.
‘What do you say?’
He gave his sickly grin.
‘Er – nothing,’ he said.
‘Then I wish you’d stop saying nothing,’ she said tartly; ‘if you’ve anything to say, say it, and if you haven’t, don’t, instead of mumbling away there and saying you’re saying nothing.’
William gave her the sickly smile again and blinked.
She clambered on to the table before the window and opened the window very slightly. Through the small aperture thus made she projected the muzzle of her gun. William watched her, paralysed with horror. Outside the medley of song rose higher and higher.
William could dimly discern the forms of his companions through the darkness. Aunt Jane was as shortsighted as she was hard of hearing.
‘I can see them,’ she said eagerly, ‘dim, lean, sinister shapes out there – now I really think I might get one or two. Anyway, the sound of the shot might drive them farther off.’
William felt as though in a nightmare, powerless to move or to speak as the old lady pointed the deadly weapon at his unsuspecting friends chanting their varied repertoire of songs so merrily in the darkness. Then, before the fatal shot rang out, William plucked her dressing-gown. She turned to him irritably and held the ear-trumpet to him again.
‘Well,’ she snapped, ‘what’s the matter now? Got anything to say yet?’
William suddenly found both his voice and an inspiration.
‘Let’s keep the gun for a – for a sort of last resource,’ he yelled into the trumpet, ‘case they sort of attack the house.’
She was obviously impressed by the idea. She took in the gun, closed the window and descended from the table.
‘I CAN SEE THEM,’ SHE SAID EAGERLY. ‘DIM, LEAN, SINISTER SHAPES OUT THERE.’
‘Something in that,’ she said.
The success of his inspiration restored William’s self-respect. Something of his dejection vanished and something of his swagger returned. Suddenly his face shone. An idea – an idea – an IDEA – had occurred to him.
‘I say,’ he gasped.
‘Well?’ she snapped.
‘I’ve heard,’ he yelled into the aperture, ‘I’ve heard that wolves are frightened of green.’
‘Of green?’ she said irritably, ‘of green what?’
‘Jus’ of green,’ said William, ‘of green colour.’
‘What nonsense!’ she snapped.
‘Well, I’ve heard it,’ persisted William. ‘Heard of a man drivin’ away a whole herd o’ wolves by jus’ goin’ out and showin’ ’em a green tablecloth.’
‘Well, I’ve not got a green tablecloth, so that settles it.’
But William didn’t think it did. ‘Haven’t you got anythin’ green?’ he persisted.
She considered.
‘One or two small green things,’ she said, ‘but green varies so. What sort of green should it be?’
William considered this question in silence for a minute. Then, ‘Can’t quite describe it,’ he yelled, ‘but I’d know if I saw.’
That, he couldn’t help thinking, was rather neat.
After a slight hesitation Aunt Jane went from the room and soon returned with an olive green scarf, a bottle green hat, and a new tie of a most virulent pea green.
William’s eyes gleamed when they fell upon the tie.
‘That’s it!’ he shouted, ‘that’s the green.’
Aunt Jane looked rather annoyed. ‘I particularly wanted that for tomorrow,’ she said peevishly, ‘won’t the scarf do? I’ve no further use for it.’
‘No,’ said William very decidedly, pointing to the tie, ‘that’s the green.’
‘All right,’ she said, ‘but it’s too dark for them to see it.’
‘I’ll take a lantern. I’ve gotter lantern in the porch.’
‘They’ll attack you if you go out there.’
‘Not if they see the green,’ said William firmly.
‘Very well,’ said Aunt Jane, who was beginning to feel rather sleepy, ‘take it if you like.’
William slipped out into the night with the green tie. Aunt Jane waited.
The noise outside died away, and all was silent.
Aunt Jane suspected that the boy had been devoured by the wolves, but the thought did not trouble her very much. She merely strengthened her fortifications and then went to bed. There was something rather inhuman about Aunt Jane. There must have been something rather inhuman about anyone who could choose a tie that colour.
The green tie had been torn into a thousand pieces, and trodden into the ditch. The toffee tin was almost empty. The waits were growing sleepy. Their songs, though no less discordant than before, were beginning to lack verve. Only Uncle Charles remained to be dealt with. Headed by William they marched upon Uncle Charles’s house. Boldly they surged into Uncle Charles’s garden. There they stood and upraised their strong young voices, and sang. Uncle Charles’s window was flung up as quickly as Uncle George’s had been.
‘Go away, you young rascals,’ he boomed.
The singing ceased.
‘Please, sir—’
In the meek falsetto Uncle Charles did not recognise his nephew William’s voice.
‘Go away, I tell you. You won’t get a halfpenny out of me.’
‘Please sir, we’re trying to go, but I’ve got all caught up in the clothes-line what was out in the grass.’
‘Well, uncatch yourself.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Cut it, then, you young fool.’
‘Please, sir, I haven’t got a penknife.’
Uncle Charles cursed softly, and after a short silence a penknife struck Ginger’s head and fell on to the lawn. William seized it eagerly and examined it. It was the one! It was the penknife he couldn’t do any harm with.
‘Cut yourself loose with that, you young scoundrels, and get off with you, disturbing people’s rest like this – if it wasn’t Christmas Eve I’d have the whole lot in jail. I’d—’
But the waits had gone. Sucking the last of the sweets and still singing horribly, they were marching back through the village.
It was the day after Christmas Day. William and Ginger and Douglas foregathered in Ginger’s back garden. It was the first time they had met since Christmas Eve. Christmas Day had perforce been spent in the bosoms of their families.
‘Well?’ said William eagerly to Ginger.
‘He didn’t say anything about the book,’ said Ginger. ‘He jus’ gave me five shillin’s.’
‘An’ neither did she about the tie,’ said Douglas, ‘she jus’ gave me five shillin’s.’
As a matter of fact Aunt Jane had gone to a neighbour the next morning to pour out the wolf story, but the neighbour (who was boiling with that indignation which only a disturbed night can produce) got in first with the wait story, and after hearing it Aunt Jane had become very thoughtful and had decided to say nothing about the wolf story.
‘Uncle Charles,’ grinned William, ‘said that some fools of choir boys got tied up in the clothes-line ’n’ he’d thrown ’em the penknife he’d got for me ’n’ they’d pinched it ’n’ he gave me five s
hillings.’
Each of the three produced two half-crowns upon a grimy palm.
William sighed happily.
‘Fifteen shillin’s,’ he said. ‘Jus’ think of it! Fifteen shillin’s! Come on. Let’s go down to the village an’ spend it.’
CHAPTER 10
WILLIAM TO THE RESCUE
ON the whole the Outlaws had had a very happy morning. They had been playing at ‘Cannibals,’ a new and absorbing game invented by William. The game originated with William’s mother’s cook, who had presented William with a tin of sardines. She was ‘turning’ out the store cupboard, and finding that she had many more sardine tins than she needed, and being in a good temper, she gave a tin to William, knowing by experience that there were few things for which William’s ingenuity could not find a use.
William and his friends were greatly thrilled by this windfall. They bore it away to the woods and made a fire. Any excuse for making a fire was welcome to the Outlaws. The process involved much blackening of hands and faces, much puffing and blowing and crawling about on hands and knees, and the collecting of enough firewood for a Crystal Palace demonstration. They killed several fires by kindness before finally they got one going.
Thrown in with the tin was an opener, and first of all the Outlaws wrestled with this in turn. William wrenched his finger, Ginger cut his thumb, and Henry dislocated his wrist before they got the tin sufficiently open to extract bits of sardine with the help of twigs. The next question was how to cook the sardines.
William was not a boy to do things in any ordinary way. William liked colour, romance, adventure. Sardines for breakfast or tea eaten with fish knives and forks and bread and butter and good manners were so dull as to be beneath contempt. Sardines cooked like this in the open over a glorious fire made a matter for the exercise of that imagination which was one of William’s particular gifts.
The Outlaws could be pioneers, gold-diggers, robber chieftains, anything. Yet William, never satisfied till he had attained perfection, thought that there must be yet another and more exciting rôle to play. And suddenly it came to him.
‘Cannibals!’ he said.
The Outlaws thrilled to the idea.
In a few seconds the scene was laid. Ginger was the unsuspecting traveller making his way through the boundless forest, and Henry and Douglas were cannibals under William’s leadership. They fell upon the unwary traveller and dragged him with savage whoops and cries to the fire. There they bound him to a tree and danced around him brandishing sticks. Then they cooked him.
The first sardine (selected at random from the heap turned out upon Douglas’s handkerchief) now represented Ginger, and the sardine tin, insecurely fastened to a stick and held over the blaze, represented the cauldron, and Ginger himself, to increase the verisimilitude, hid behind a bush. Then they ate Ginger, chanting wild songs.
The sardine gone, Ginger emerged from the bush and joined them in the capacity of cannibal, and Henry in his turn was the unwary traveller proceeding through the boundless forest. He was captured, danced round, and eaten like Ginger. Douglas and William followed as unwary travellers in their turn, and the performance each time grew more realistic and bloodcurdling by the addition of such things as tomahawks and daggers and swords, and a horrible show of torturing and scalping the victims invented by William.
But when each one of the Outlaws had impersonated the unwary traveller (and William’s dying groans had aroused real admiration and envy in the breasts of his companions), no one felt any desire to repeat the performance. For one thing the taste of burnt sardine is an acquired taste, and the Outlaws had not been wholly successful in acquiring it. Yet they were loth to relinquish their rôles, which were gaining in realism each minute. In fact, Douglas, dispensing altogether with the sardine substitute, was at that minute sitting on Henry and making a most effective pretence of gnawing off his ear, while Henry’s screams of agony would have done credit to a hyena.
It was William who thought of varying the proceedings by introducing the fresh character of a rescue party. Ginger was to be a fair damsel captured by Henry and Douglas, the cannibals, and William, a passing traveller, was to hear her cries for help and come to her rescue.
Beyond Ginger’s inability to resemble a fair damsel (except for a rather good falsetto ‘Help! Help!’) it was a great success, and the battle between William and Ginger (who proved quite a creditable Amazon) against Henry and Douglas was an enthralling one.
Henry had entered into the spirit of the thing so much that he retired behind a tree with a little clump of moss which he pretended to eat with much show of enjoyment, persisting (to William’s indignation) that it was William’s scalp. This new version of the game might have gone on indefinitely had not one of the keepers heard their voices, and, recognising his inveterate enemies, charged them on sight.
Cannibals, traveller, and distressed damsel fled to the road like four streaks of lightning, leaving only a smoking fire, a sardine tin, a few bits of dismembered sardine and a perspiring keeper to mark the scene.
On reaching the road the Outlaws discovered that it was lunch time, and wended their way back to the village, carrying on a cannibal v. traveller guerrilla warfare all the time, while Ginger (who fancied himself very much as the distressed damsel) practised his ‘Help! Help!’, making it higher and higher and shriller and shriller till it almost wandered off the scale altogether.
At the cross-roads they separated to go to their respective homes. Their rôles were by this time slightly mixed. Douglas was making a great play of eating a large stone, which he said was William’s head, and William was licking his lips and evincing every sign of satisfaction over a stick which he said was Douglas’s leg.
Ginger was still chirping his ‘Help! Help!’, trying to solve the difficult problem of reconciling highness in the scale (which he associated with the female voice) with that resonance and loudness that he felt to be an essential part of any cry for help. Henry was leaping and brandishing a stick and practising his war-whoop.
William threw away Douglas’s leg in his garden and entered the house. The spell of his morning’s game was still upon him. He had enjoyed being a cannibal, and he had enjoyed rescuing distressed damsels from cannibals. He entered the hall. He could hear his sister Ethel’s voice from the morning-room.
‘I don’t love him at all. I’m being forced to marry him against my will. I have no one to turn to for help. My heart fails me. He presses his suit every day. He is coming this afternoon and my parents will force me to accede to his proposals. Alas, what shall I do?’
William, open-mouthed with amazement, eyes nearly starting out of his head, went upstairs to his room. Poor Ethel! What a rotten shame – his father and mother forcing poor Ethel to marry a man she didn’t love. Of all the cheek. Why should poor Ethel marry a man she didn’t love?
Between William and his sister there existed, as a rule, a state of armed warfare, but William’s heart was now full of indignation and pity. He had spent the morning rescuing one distressed damsel in the shape of Ginger, and he was quite prepared to spend the afternoon rescuing another in the shape of Ethel.
‘Gosh!’ he muttered to his reflection as he brushed his hair savagely. ‘Fancy them forcin’ her to marry someone she doesn’t love! Rotten!’
Downstairs in the morning-room Ethel closed the book and yawned. ‘It is piffle, isn’t it?’ she said.
Mrs Brown looked up from her mending.
‘Yes, dear, it is. I don’t think we’ll read any more. But they hadn’t any of my list in, and I just took it at random from the shelves. It’s nearly lunch time, isn’t it?’
Ethel rose, yawned again, and went out into the hall. She met William coming downstairs. He threw her a mysterious look of sympathy and indignation.
‘’S all right, Ethel,’ he whispered huskily. ‘Don’ you worry. I’ll see you through.’
She gaped at him, but he had disappeared into the dining-room.
‘Now we mustn’t forg
et,’ said Mrs Brown at lunch, when she had made suitable comments on the state of William’s hair and hands and face and nails, ‘that Mr Polluck’s coming today, and I told your father that one of us would meet him.’
Again Ethel met William’s eye and again he threw her that mysterious glance.
Mrs Brown intercepted and misinterpreted it. ‘Don’t you feel well, dear?’ she said solicitously.
‘Yes thanks,’ muttered William.
‘I thought he was looking queer when I saw him in the hall,’ admitted Ethel. ‘I believe he’s been eating green apples again. You know what happened last time.’
‘Oh, no,’ said William, nobly forgiving her for her unfeeling tone, and for her callous misunderstanding of his signals of sympathy, and added meaningly, ‘It’s not that. Oh, no, it’s not that – it’s somethin’ very different to green apples.’
‘’S ALL RIGHT, ETHEL,’ HE WHISPERED HUSKILY. ‘DON’ YOU WORRY. I’LL SEE YOU THROUGH!’
And again he gazed fixedly at Ethel, who returned his look blankly. The Brown family were quite accustomed to mysterious remarks and tones from William, and attached no meaning to them whatever.
After lunch he followed his mother into the drawing-room.
‘What time is this Mr Polluck comin’?’ he said to her coldly. He felt that he had declared war now on both his parents in defence of the deeply-wronged Ethel.
‘His train gets in at four o’clock. Oh dear, that reminds me, somebody must meet him. Robert dear,’ as her elder son entered, ‘are you doing anything this afternoon?’
‘Yes,’ said Robert, very quickly, ‘I’m going to tennis at the Maylands’, and I’ve promised to be there by four.’
‘Well, you could easily go round by the station and meet Mr Polluck and bring him here before you go, couldn’t you, dear? It would be so kind of you.’
Then, lest Robert should discover some irrefutable reason why he could not possibly meet Mr Polluck’s train, she went quickly upstairs for her afternoon’s rest.
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