The Enthusiasts
“I am, I confess, naturally inclined to that which misguided Zeal terms Superstition.”
Ibid (Section 3)
* * *
SIMON and Andrew, named not so much for the fishermen Apostles as after their respective maternal grandfathers, kicked stones all the way back to school. They were not reproved by Mr. Colson because he recognised the signs of disappointment and fatigue and knew that, at the age of ten years, frustration dims the sense of proportion.
The school lunch had not helped matters. It had consisted of shepherd’s pie and carrots, followed by ginger stodge and a custard which, as Richard pointed out to the junior master in charge of the table, “jolly well hasn’t cussed, sir.” However, there was not, at the time, much trouble, because the boys had been looking forward to the dig.
An indignation meeting was held in the form-room before Mr. Colson came in to take the last lesson of the afternoon. It was noisy and unconstructive and resolved itself, for practical purposes, into a reiterated statement that the excavation had been a rotten swindle and the lunch had been lousy. There were no dissenting voices, so that even the solace of argument was not present. The meeting broke up unwillingly upon Mr. Colson’s entrance and the grievances were referred to him.
“Sir, don’t you think we were digging in the wrong place, sir?”
“Sir, it stands to reason, sir, that there must be more Roman things on Mr. Dickon’s land than just a mouldy old pot and a mask.” The boys had been told nothing about the silver coins, the headmaster being of the opinion that cupidity in his charges was not to be encouraged.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mr. Colson, who, privately, was as disappointed as the children that nothing had come of their enthusiastic toil, “it’s all on the knees of the gods.”
“Sir, what does that mean, sir?”
“Sir, could we go there again, sir? To do some more digging, sir?”
“Sir, I’ve got a big blister on my hand.”
“I bet my blister’s bigger than yours, Sysko.”
“I bet you it jolly well isn’t! Look, sir, isn’t my blister bigger than Pragso’s blister, sir?”
“Sir, I’ve got a jolly good idea, sir!”
“Swallow it, you ass!”
“No, honestly, it’s an awfully good idea. Sir, couldn’t we measure their blisters in metres in your maths lesson, sir? —to compare them, sir?”
“The metre, my dear friend Andrew,” said Mr. Colson, “measures rather more than a yard.”
“Oh, sir! Isn’t Saintso an ass, sir!” Followed some ecstatic shoving and kicking which Mr. Colson ended by literally hurling the children into their seats.
“Mental arithmetic: number down to twenty,” he said; and so, for him, the period wore on, but not unpleasantly, for his nervous system was in excellent order and he was, in a bear-like fashion, fond of his small boys. The day wore on for Simon, too. He had hinted darkly to Andrew that there was something in the wind and was enjoying his friend’s efforts to get him to say what it was.
Andrew’s curiosity was not satisfied until they were washing their hands before tea. They contrived to take longer than the others—not that this presented much difficulty, for tea was as popular with the little boys of Pelican House Academy as lunch had been the reverse—and then Andrew, ignoring the claims upon his conscience exerted by the headmaster’s frequent allusions to the desirability of gentlemanly behaviour and the spirit of friendship, advanced threateningly with two very wet paper towels.
“Now tell, you silly louse, or I’ll stuff these down your neck!”
“All right! I was going to tell you now, anyway!”
“All right. Go on, then.”
“I am going on. You know the film show after tea?”
“Well?”
“We’re not going to it.”
“But it’s a Space Thing, you ass!”
“We’re sure to have seen it before. And I heard there’s a geography one before it, all about growing rice, or some rot. Look, if we sit by Mr. Peters, we can easily get out. I can always get out of his lessons if I say I feel sick. I did once cat right out in front of him and he nearly catted himself. I’ve only got to feel sick in the beginning of the film, and all you need do is ask if you shall go out with me. He’s sure to say you can, because otherwise he’ll think he ought to come out with me himself, and then, if I did cat—only, of course, I shan’t . . .”
“Dry up. What have we got to oil out of the film for?”
“To dig, you fool.”
“Dig?”
“Oh, grow up! Everybody thinks we dug in the wrong beastly place. We’re going to have another bash after tea.”
“Tea! Gosh! Come on! Those vulturous cormorants at our table will have swiped everything, and it’s fish-paste and damson jam day!”
After tea, the scheme for coming out of the film show worked like a charm owing to Simon’s correct assessment of the queasiness of Mr. Peters’ stomach, that erudite gentleman having ordered Simon, who had prepared the way by sketching out a few experimental but realistic retchings, not to stay upon the order of his going, but to “get out quick, you filthy little brute!”
It was still beautifully light when, armed with small gardening forks and a couple of trowels filched from the school shed, the two boys arrived at Dickon’s smallholding. Simon had allotted himself the task of spokesman and Andrew, a stolid, loyal, dependable child, was under strict orders to remain silent unless it was necessary for him to corroborate his leader’s words. These words were but lightly related to the truth.
“Mr. Colson wanted us to have one more bash, Mr. Dickon. He thought you wouldn’t mind as long as we don’t dig anywhere but just in the same corner. Is that all right?”
“I reckon so. You can’t do no harm, as I knows on. Will you keep an eye on our Alfie? His mother wants to go up to the Stone ‘Ouse to ‘elp wi’ the dinner. Dame Beatrice got a party on, or summat o’ that. Mother can take the baby, but Alfie, ‘e’s an ‘andful. ‘Ow long you reckon to be ‘ere?”
“About an hour, unless we find something really exciting, Mr. Dickon. Thanks a lot. Yes, we’ll keep an eye on your little boy.”
“Right, then. Alfie can bring his toy spade. It’ll give un sommat to do. I’ll be through with my little job I’m doin’ in about ‘arf an hour, so, if your master telled you to stay an hour, we’ll all be suited.”
The boys confidently and amiably took charge of Alfie, and soon all three were industriously flinging up the light, dry soil.
“How deep do you think we ought to go before we try another place?” asked Andrew, wiping a grimy hand across a face shining with perspiration.
“Mr. Colson says sometimes you have to go eight or nine feet down.”
“Gosh!”
“But sometimes you find things a lot nearer the surface.”
“I should jolly well hope so. I say, this looks like a grave, doesn’t it?”
“Better put Alfie on to another place, in case he falls in.”
“What about putting him in and letting him carry on while we try a new place? That’ll keep him out of the way.”
“Good idea. Alfie, you’d like to go into the big hole, wouldn’t you? Perhaps you’ll dig down to Australia.”
Alfie, who was not in the least imaginative or nervous, took kindly to being dumped in the hole and told to go on digging. He was covered in soil from his light, Saxon hair to the soles of his stout little shoes, and was entirely, blissfully happy. He was fully occupied and felt extremely important. He was delighted to be working with older children, particularly as one of them had given him a fluff-covered sweet retrieved from the depths of a trousers’ pocket.
Simon and Andrew doggedly began to dig in a spot a yard or two from the hole. After a bit, they tried another place and by the time Dickon took Alfie off their hands (to his intense and vociferous disgust) they had dug up an aggregate of at least forty square yards of the smallho
lding.
“I hope we haven’t tried in too many places, and mucked up your garden,” said Andrew. “We don’t seem to have had any luck. How far down did you dig when you found the pot and the mask?”
“Oh, a matter of a couple o’ spits, like. I believes in givin’ this light stuff a right-down good turn over once every two years and a fork-over in between.”
“Yes, I see. Well, we’ve gone down more than two spits, I think, haven’t we, Sysko?”
“I’m beginning to think there isn’t anything else to find,” said Simon. “What do you think, Mr. Dickon?”
“I couldn’t say, sir. You be welcome to go on tryin’ if you want. It loosens the garden up and lets the air in, if no then else. ‘ere’s a bit o’ cake for ee.”
He nodded kindly and hauled Alfie off to help feed the pigs, an occupation which immediately stifled his son’s protests. Then, the enormous hunks of carraway-seed cake having been consumed by the archæologists, these worked on in weary silence. As the church clock struck six they cleaned their tools with bits of stick, called out farewells and thanks, and trudged back to school. They were seated in the day-room, and the tools were back in the tool-shed, ten minutes before the rest of the school came out from the school hall in which the film had been shown.
“What was it like?” asked Simon.
“Lousy. Why, didn’t you see it?”
“No. I told Mr. Peters I was going to cat and he chucked me out and Saintso came with me to make sure I was all right.”
“And did you cat? I’m not surprised. I thought the potted meat at tea was absolutely crawling.”
“No, I didn’t cat. I knew I wouldn’t. Anyway, I didn’t have any potted meat because you silly cormorants had swallowed the lot before Saintso and I got a smell of it.”
“Smell is right,” said Charles, alias Pragso. “The filthy stuff absolutely stank. I’d write home about it, only I’m sure the beaks read all our letters, although they don’t say they do. But when Mr. Colson asks me how I spell ‘essential’—well, I know what to think, because I told my people, in my last letter but one, that it was absolutely essential I should have extra riding lessons so that they can safely buy me a much bigger pony for Christmas so that I can do them credit and my kid sister can have the present pony all to herself, because we share it, and I take a dim view of always having to groom it when it ought to be her job, because she has it all the time I’m at school and still wants it in the holidays.”
“Kid sisters get everything,” said Francis. “Anyway, you two lucky swine got out of seeing the film, did you?”
“What was wrong with it?”
“It wasn’t a Space Thing at all. It was two mouldy old jogger films about the weather and about Egyptian cotton. It was absolutely lousy and I think we all ought to bounce you two on the dorm floor for getting out of it.”
“Hear, hear!” said several voices.
“Shut up, you silly maggots,” said Andrew. “It isn’t as though we had any fun.”
“Why, what did you do?”
“Tell you after lights out, when Mr. Peters has made his rounds. But no bouncing, mind.”
He recounted the short and simple story, as he had promised.
“And there really wasn’t anything else there?” asked a voice, identifiable as that of Francis, out of the darkness.
“Not a single sausage. We dug up most of the garden. It was a bally swindle.”
“Serve you right.”
“O.K. O.K. O.K.”
“Well, one thing, we needn’t sweat to get Mr. Colson to take the rest of us over there anymore. But are you sure you really dug up the place?”
“Yes, of course we’re sure. Grow up! There wasn’t a thing.”
“I say,” said Charles, “you don’t think Mr. Dickon planted the stuff himself and then pretended he’d dug it up, do you?”
“Why should he do that? Don’t be a fool,” said Andrew.
“To get in the papers, you ass.”
“I say!” said Simon, “Could be!”
The dormitory settled down, but the subject was resumed on the following day in rather different form.
“You know,” said Richard, speaking in his unemotional way, “I keep wondering about that man in sandals and that woman in the floppy dress. The man who mended Sysko’s shoe, I mean.”
“What about him?” demanded Simon. “It was jolly decent of him to stick the heel on again.”
“Yes, but why did he come on to the farm?”
“It isn’t a farm, you fool. It’s just a smallholding. Don’t you know the difference?”
“A sort of croft,” explained Andrew, who came from the west of Scotland.
“Of course I know the difference. What do names matter? Mr. Colson says Shakespeare didn’t think they did. He couldn’t even spell his own.”
“Oh, dry up about Shakespeare. We all know you’re going to be Oberon, so what?”
“I’m only saying . . . and, anyway, it was Juliet who said about a rose and all that. My sister was it in the R.A.D.A. play, so what?”
“Oh, let’s get on with it. Get on, Chardso, and make it snappy.”
“It’s nothing, really,” said Richard. “I thought they were suspicious characters.”
“Oh, phooey! I expect they came from an art colony or something.”
“They might be nudists.”
“You can’t be a nudist if you wear clothes.”
“You have to wear clothes outside a nudist camp. The police would jolly soon haul you in if you didn’t.”
“I expect they just eat carrots and things.”
“Carrots are jolly good for you. You don’t get spots if you eat them.”
“Why don’t you eat some, then?”
“Oh, do dry up! Chardso’s got the attention of the House.”
“Funny ass!”
“What House?”
“It’s what Mr. Colson says when we have a debate. Now, then, shut up and listen. Go on, Chardso.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t. They remind me of something, and I don’t know what it is.”
“Well!” exclaimed Simon in disgust. “If that’s all you can say! Let’s bump him for wasting our time!”
The subsequent proceedings were interrupted by the entrance of Mr. Peters, his youthful chin stuck out in uncompromising wrath. He fastened a pincer-grip upon the right and left ears respectively of Simon and Andrew.
“To the headmaster, you little headaches! Quick march!” he said.
Both boys squealed automatically.
“Sir, we haven’t done anything, sir!” protested Simon.
“Not a bally single thing, sir,” said Andrew.
“No?” Mr. Peters smiled sardonically, released the two ears but wound a massive and thoughtful hand in each boy’s hair. “What about cutting the film show last night?”
“Cutting it, sir? But, sir, I asked you if I could go out.”
“And you said I could go with him, sir.”
“Are you really taking us to the headmaster, sir?” asked Simon. “Because, well, won’t he wonder why you didn’t take me to Matron or something when I told you I was going to be sick?”
Mr. Peters released them.
“You win, you little horrors,” he said. “Now tell me what you got up to.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Grisly Occupant
“Where I cannot satisfy my reason, I love to humour my fancy.”
Ibid (Section 10)
* * *
“THEY can have me, they think,” said Marigold, who had run after the nuns, walked with them some distance along the road and then returned, at a kind of lolloping gallop, to the smallholder’s gate, “but they’ve got to ask somebody called Reverend Mother.”
“Of course,” said Phlox. “But it will be all right. Your light luggage will see you through for a couple of nights, will it not?”
“Oh, yes. But
—are you sure? I hate to desert you.”
“Perfectly sure. I shall feel free then to join in the joviality tonight at the village inn. Who knows?—I may pick up something quite new in the way of folklore; something quite fascinating and Cecil Sharp, you know. I should not care to introduce you to the bucolic stares and rustic jesting of the local peasants, so I shall be happier, for once, on my own.”
“Of course, if you say so,” agreed the meek Marigold. “How shall I get my light luggage from Bossbury station without the aid of the vicar’s car?—Oh, and what will you do if the farmer can’t put you up? You really can’t sleep in a barn!”
“I shall contrive something, never fear. As for the luggage, we will go to the station as soon as we know for certain that you will be received at the convent and then the station cab can transport both yourself and your bag. So let us trot along and catch up with your party again and I will accompany you in their motor-coach and then wait for you in the station booking hall.”
This programme was carried out. Phlox and Marigold literally trotted along to join the nuns and accompany them to the convent, and Marigold rejoined Phlox some two and a half hours later.
“They would have me stay to tea,” she explained. “At least, they gave me tea. One doesn’t eat with them, but in a small private room called, quaintly, the parlour. After this, I am to stay in the guest-house.”
“Will they provide you with accommodation for three nights, then?”
“Willingly. And with all meals. May I have some money? What ought I to give them?”
“Anything which your generosity suggests, my dear. Here is the wallet I have been taking care of for you. It is, after all, your own, to do with as you will. Be lavish rather than parsimonious. They are rendering us a great and necessary service. Oh, by the way, it might be as well not to let our good friend Pierce know that you have accepted the hospitality of another Church. He appears to be a broadminded man—indeed, I think he is, or he would hardly add to his stipend, inadequate though it must be, by taking in paying guests—but it might irk him to think that, because he is not able to house us just at present, he has driven you into the arms of the Scarlet Woman. You understand me?”
Say It With Flowers (Mrs. Bradley) Page 4