'And that the lamps and the tyres are all right. I'm not going to break my neck.'
'All right, then, but they will be all right. And who cares, anyway, about your bally neck?'
'And,' said Skene, with sudden cunning, 'that if we win anything on the Dogs, we split it fifty-fifty. You're always much luckier than I am.'
' Win anything on the – Gosh! I'd never thought of that!' said Merrys, startled. 'I say, though, that would make a stink if it came out! Do you think – ?'
'It's my last condition,' said Skene, who now saw a ray of hope that the expedition, of which he was thoroughly nervous, might, after all, be abandoned. 'Unless you bet, and we split your winnings, I'm out. I don't mind subbing up half your stake if you lose,' he added handsomely.
'You're a blasted Shylock,' said Merrys. 'All right, then, fifty-fifty.'
Hope died in Skene's loyal but cautious breast.
'All right, then,' he agreed despondently. 'I'm on, I suppose. Let's do it soon and get it over.'
*
Merrys was not the only person who was disgruntled that he had missed a visit to the Roman Bath. Mr Loveday (Albert-Edward to the members of his House) was a mild and scholarly gentleman of advanced views, particularly on what is called, erroneously, discipline, but as a rule he reserved these views for the eyes of editors of educational journals. On this occasion, however, he felt that he had been cold-shouldered to the point of insult, for Mr Conway had not seen fit to inform him that he was keeping back one of his candidates for immersion, although there was evidence that the boy had pointed this out.
'It's time we thought of some better way of managing boys than by beating them and putting them in Detention,' he observed bitterly in the Common Room, after his roll-call for the Roman Bath had failed to elicit a response from Merrys. 'I don't complain, of course. Those are the recognized ways of keeping order, especially by people whose brains and personalities are deficient in the vital qualities which go to make a schoolmaster. Nevertheless' – he glared at the back of Mr Conway's neck – 'I am suffering from –'
'Another overdose of Neill magnesia?' said Mr Conway, turning his head only slightly. He was young enough to despise Mr Loveday wholeheartedly. He thought it was quite time that the Headmaster dispossessed some of these senile Housemasters – got them to take Orders and push off into rural England – so that their legitimate successors (himself primarily) could afford to marry and settle down. 'Go and work it off somewhere else, Loveday, old dear. I can't help it if your whelps aren't given a chance to do their Prep, and so fall down on their classwork.'
'I don't believe in all this Prep,' said Mr Loveday, his fingers angrily clutching the bowl of the pipe that was in his jacket pocket. 'With competent teaching it is quite unnecessary. As for keeping boys in when they should be taking exercise' – he broke off to glare across the room again at the thick-set, aggressive, black-haired Mr Conway, who, unfortunately, again had his back to him and was earnestly discussing the respective merits of pre-war light ales with a master of his own age and tastes – 'then, I say, it is time to consider whether the principle of granting and withholding privileges is not very much to be preferred.'
'It's what they try at Borstal Institutions, isn't it?' said Mr Conway, suddenly swinging round. 'Why don't you get a job at one of them?'
Mr Loveday, who was a genuine reformer and therefore did not make quite such a mess with his theories as a less sincere man might have done, said that, in his view, the system, Borstal-based or not, was the right one. He then referred (mistakenly) to the success of his Roman-Bath privileges and their abuse by incapable form-masters, and received in reply a long and spirited denunciation of his boys from Mr Conway, who referred to their sins of omission and commission, their furtiveness, their impudence, their laziness, their slackness in form and on the games-field, their unwashedness (Roman Bath or no Roman Bath), and their general and unrelieved wrong-headedness.
'In other words,' said Mr Conway unpardonably, 'they're governed by a couple of elderly women, and they know it.'
Mr Loveday turned very white, and another master said, quietly, 'Steady on, Conway,' but, beyond his ebbing colour and a sudden intake of breath as though something had sharply hurt him, Mr Loveday made no attempt to challenge the insult. He gave Conway a straight glance, and walked out. It had been a mild Common Room joke for years that Mr Loveday's sister, who was his housekeeper, wore the trousers, but it was a joke so far made in Mr Loveday's absence.
*
Mr Kay, referred to by Skene as Spivvy and as possessing a cottage which the Dog-fanciers would have to pass on their way out from school, was the only married member of the staff who was not a Housemaster. He was too newly-joined to have been given a House, and, a cottage falling vacant upon the cricket professional's retirement to his home town in Yorkshire (and no other professional having been appointed), Mr Kay had been granted the use of this cottage for himself and his wife. He paid no rent, but had given Mr Wyck, the Headmaster, an undertaking that he would keep the cottage garden tidy without pressing the Headmaster's gardener into service, and would vacate the place if another pro were appointed.
Mr Kay was not very popular with the boys, and some of the masters despised him. He was yellow-faced, black-eyed, and claimed to be half-Portuguese – his mother had been born in Brazil – and Mr Conway, who had a sharp but accurate tongue, called him Louis the Spiv, for Mr Kay taught French to the lower forms and Economics on the Science side. Thus Mr Conway's nickname for him was sufficiently descriptive to be considered worthy of Common Room use by some of the younger masters. It had also become known to the boys, a fact of which Mr Kay had been apprised by a Fourth Form clerihew, which he had been handed, cheekily, in place of a French exercise. It ran:
Louis the Spiv
Had not the right to live.
Like every other skunk, He stunk.
It had also leaked out (again through Mr Conway, who interested himself unkindly in other people's affairs) that Mr Kay had taught for a time at a grammar school somewhere in the Midlands, and had left hurriedly in the middle of a term. He was, in consequence of Mr Conway's discoveries and verbal allusions, a solitary man, not even very happily married, and as soon as his duties for the day were over, he was in the habit of going home to his cottage for the evening and night, and shutting himself up with his work. He did not return to School until nine-thirty on the following morning.
The pious argument voiced by Merrys, therefore, that Mr Kay would be in the masters' Common Room when the truants departed for their illegal outing, was based on a fallacy. Mr Kay was not only in his cottage when the boys went by, but he even heard the sound of the bicycle wheels on the gravel drive near his windows.
The sound did not disturb him in the slightest. Marrys and Skene were far too wary to risk talking to one another while they were so near the School, and Mr Kay, hearing the bicycle's somewhat laboured progress, merely concluded that it marked the entrance or exit of the postman, who must be rather later than usual. He did not draw aside his curtain to glance out. He did not listen for the postman's knock. His wife was away from home, and he had heard from her by the morning delivery. He was not expecting any other letters.
Merrys and Skene had found it unexpectedly easy to borrow Mr Loveday's bicycle. They did not even have to take Jack the Ripper – Mr Loveday's knife-and-boot boy – into their confidence. It was Merrys who had done the actual borrowing. Skene had insisted on this.
'You got me to promise to come,' he said. 'It's up to you to do the rest.'
'Cold feet?' asked Merrys, in accents calculated to embarrass and wound the hearer.
'Yes, if you want to know, I have got cold feet,' said Skene, firmly. 'But I said I'd come with you, so I'm coming. But that's all I'm going to do.'
'All right, then,' said Merrys. 'I only wish it was Conway's bike, though,' he added, in a different tone. 'The silly, sickening, unfair beast! I'd jolly well smash it up for him as well as borrow it, if I had it.'
Merrys did not contest this, but went off to spy out the lie of the land with a view to sneaking the bicycle. Mr Loveday's potting-sheds, garage, and kitchen premises were out of bounds to his boys, but there were ways and means of circumventing this law.
'I say, Stallard,' said Merrys, presenting himself before his House captain as that august man was dismembering a bloater which he had just cooked for himself over his study fire, 'I'm awfully sorry, but I've dropped a gym shoe out of the dorm window, and I think it's got caught in a bush. May I go round and pick it up?'
'How the devil could it drop out of the dorm window?' demanded Stallard, irritated, for a bloater must be eaten. hot, in his opinion, or not at all. Fagging was not part of the official system at Spey, and he did not want the trouble of cooking another bloater if this one grew cold and, in his view, inedible.
'Please, Stallard, I had cleaned it, and shoved – put it on the window-ledge to dry, and, as I went to move away, I suppose I must have caught it with the edge of my hand, sort of, and –'
'Oh, go to hell and get it!' said Stallard, hitching his chair nearer the table and picking up a fork and a bit of bread. 'And no messing about, do you hear!'
'Oh, yes, Stallard. Thanks a lot.'
Merrys then ran round to the forbidden territory, found the coast clear, collared the bicycle, hid it in the bushes and rejoined his comrade. Both were studious during Prep, both ate large suppers of bread and margarine, both responded to Call-Over in the hearty, trumpet-voice of virtue, and both (having sworn the two boys in their dormitory to secrecy) descended on to the roof of Mr Loveday's outhouse, crept past a chimney-stack, slithered down a drainpipe, and so gained the kitchen garden unheard, unseen, and unthought-of, at exactly ten minutes past nine.
Mr Loveday kept no watchdog. Their progress was neither stayed nor interrupted. Merrys dragged the bicycle from the bushes and wheeled it up a concrete path and then across Mr Loveday's lawn. Soon Skene had mounted to the step, Merrys was in the saddle, and the boys were on the main drive and zigzagging towards Mr Kay's cottage and the School gates.
The new dog-racing track was distant some seven miles from the School. With optimism which proved to be misplaced, Merrys had allowed half an hour each way for the journey. Winter Call-Over was at nine, and boys of the age of the heroes were expected to put lights out at half-past. Talking was then allowed until a quarter to ten, and silence was anticipated from that hour until half-past six on the following morning. Housemasters made their own rules, and these were the rules of Mr Loveday.
It was therefore a little after nine-fifteen when Skene and Merrys reached the road beyond the School, and half-past chimed from a church tower when, the School two miles or so behind them, and the bicycle careering merrily down a steep hill, the lads left care in the background and began to enjoy the escapade.
'I say, this is wizard!' observed Merrys. Comfortably seated – for Mr Loveday was not a tall gentleman and Merrys was a long-legged youth – he was allowing the bicycle, still zigzagging a little, to cut out a good pace along the moorland road.
'Smashing!' agreed Skene, although he was still not so wholeheartedly enthusiastic as his friend. In addition, his position on the vehicle was not particularly comfortable, as anyone who has ridden on the step of a bicycle will know. In fact, it was not so very long before he suggested that it might be a good idea for the two of them to change places.
Almost as soon as the exchange was made, he thought better of it, for the flattish half-mile of lonely countryside which had succeeded the downhill glide gave place to a long hill up which the bicycle ground its way to the agony of both its passengers.
The dog-racing track came in sight at last, however, and the boys, secreting their – or rather Mr Loveday's – machine in an alley, walked up to the gates and sought admission. They were daunted by the discovery that it was necessary to pay half a crown each before they could pass the turnstiles. Merrys looked at Skene, and Skene said, with gloomy doggedness, that he was hanged if he was going to fork out half a crown for the doubtful pleasure of watching a couple of races, which was all they could possibly find time for. Merrys was inclined to agree. The man on the gate took no notice of them, except to suggest that they had better make up their minds, or the crowd would be out, anyway, before they got inside.
'Why, what time is it over?' asked Merrys.
'Last race about half-past ten,' replied Aeacus. The boys looked at one another again. Then Merrys turned away, and, followed by the faithful but greatly-relieved Skene, took up the bicycle and pushed it disgustedly into the main road to make for home. Suddenly he changed his mind.
'I say, we needn't go back yet,' he suggested.
'Better not, perhaps,' agreed Skene. 'The beaks won't be in bed yet, and we don't want to get nabbed by somebody walking across the quad.'
'Besides, we've got to put Albert-Edward's bike to bed,' said Merrys, 'and it won't do to sneak round there if there's any chance of anybody hearing us. Tell you what! Let's go through the town on to the bypass and use the cycle track as far as Belling cross-roads. Then we can cut across the moor– it's quite a good surface, I expect – and get back into the village by Double Corner. It's not so hilly that way, either.'
The cycling track alongside the bypass brought the adventurers all too soon to the cross-roads at which they were obliged to turn eastwards. After the broad, well-lighted road, the little white track across the moor looked narrow, lonely, and frightening.
'I say, I almost wish we'd gone the other way,' said Merrys. His knee, on the mudguard, had grown (he believed) a corn, and his foot, on the step, had gone to sleep. 'What about me pedalling now?'
'Steady, you ass!' cried Skene, as his friend attempted to alleviate the discomfort of his position. 'You'll have us into the heather! Count 500 out loud, and then we'll change.'
His friend obeyed; they stopped the bicycle, changed about, and the moor grew larger all round them. The road was eerily lonely, the night grew blacker and blacker, and the journey, which had become more and more uncomfortable, now seemed disagreeably long.
'I should have thought we'd have been in sight of the village by now,' said Skene, at last.
'Well, I don't know,' said Merrys, who (secretly) had been thinking the same thing for the past quarter of an hour. 'Come to think of it, you see, all the lights would be out by now. You know how early villagers go to bed. We won't know we're in the village until we get there. We shall suddenly come to the pub. That's the first building, going by this road.'
'I suppose,' said Skene, 'we haven't missed Double Corner in the dark?'
'Good Lord, no, of course not!' said the startled Merrys. 'How could we miss it, you ass?'
'Easily, I should think,' said Job's comforter, now on the step. 'The trouble would be to see it. Except for our front lamp, it's as black as your hat all the way.'
At the end of another quarter of an hour the horrid truth had to be faced. The Corner must lie some miles in the rear of the cyclists. These, however, were not free from the unreasonable human conviction that to go on is better than to go back.
'We're sure to come to somewhere soon,' said Merrys. 'Ten to one, if we rode back, we'd only miss it again, and be no better off. We don't want to find ourselves back in that bally town.'
It was at this point that they saw a light ahead of them. Both boys were greatly relieved. They took it for granted that they had come to the inn. Once through the village, a little over a mile would bring them to the gates of the School – or, rather, to where the gates had been. They had been seized for scrap, and the governors had not replaced them.
The bicycle lamp, however, showed a broken fence painted in some dark colour, a ragged hedge, and a glimmering path between bushes.
2. Witches' Brew
*
Why are the Laws levell'd at us? – are we more dishonest than the rest of Mankind?
IBID. (Act 2,
Scene 4)
MRS BEATRICE ADELA LESTRANGE BRADLEY had long cherished the notion of writing an account of an ancestress of her own, one Mary Toadflax, who bore the early seventeenth-century reputation of having been a witch.
Finding herself with some welcome leisure one summer, Mrs Bradley therefore had begun her researches into this fascinating history, and had progressed far enough to be able to pass the results on to a specialist in such matters.
He was able, at the end of eighteen months of painstaking work, to direct her to the village of Spey, where, in the possession of an old woman named Lecky Harries, was a book of spells and charms which, he had reason to believe, might have been the property of Mary Toadflax in her heyday and which, for some unknown reason, had escaped the fire which consumed its owner.
The details which he was able to supply tempted Mrs Bradley to leave her clinic in the care of her chief assistant, and travel north and east to the cottage where the book reposed. She had no adventures on the way. Spey was clearly marked on the Ordnance map, and she arrived there without difficulty under the guidance of her chauffeur George.
Enquiry by George at the village public house set them upon the road which led to the cottage, and at about three in the afternoon of a bright October day Mrs Bradley was knocking on the door of Lecky Harries.
'But she's a witch,' they had told George at the inn. 'Better not take any risks. If thy lass won't have thee, try another. Old Mother Harries might give thee the wrong brew!'
'After which, madam,' said George, describing the incident, 'there was bucolic mirth of a Miltonian type. I purchased a round of drinks for my informants, and, as it was almost closing time, escaped a return of hospitality.'
Mrs Bradley was not more superstitious than her levelheaded factotum, yet she felt a keen stirring of interest when the door of the cottage was opened by a pale-faced but dark-complexioned man with greasy black hair and yellow-ringed black eyes who asked her, none too civilly, what she wanted.
'Your paramour, incubus,' said Mrs Bradley brightly. There was a senile, shrill chuckle from the opposite side of the room, and a little, bent, bright-eyed old woman got up from the chimney corner and, grasping hold of a long stick, sagged forward over the carpetless floor to greet the visitor.
Tom Brown's Body Page 2