Tom Brown's Body (2 page)

'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.'

'No, you wouldn't, chump. There'd be a row, and everything would come out.'

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.

*

Why are the Laws levell'd at us? – are we more dishonest than the rest of Mankind?

IBID.
(
Act 2, Scene 4
)

M
RS
B
EATRICE
A
DELA
L
ESTRANGE
B
RADLEY
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.

The dark gentleman slammed the door behind him, and was gone.

'Come you in, my pretty,' said the hag unnecessarily to Mrs Bradley, 'for I can tell you're a woman by the pattern your posy of fingers makes on my heart.'

'You can't see me?' Mrs Bradley enquired; for the bright eyes were as brilliant as her own.

'I can see nought, nor haven't, this twenty years,' pronounced the sibyl, 'but I can tell by your voice how warm you are. Burning for love, eh, my lassie? Come to old Mother Lecky for a wee small drink, have you? Sit down, and tell your grandma your troubles.'

'I want facts about Mary Toadflax,' said Mrs Bradley distinctly. She could have sworn that the bright eyes searched her face. Then Mother Harries nodded.

'You shall have them,' she said. 'But first you must stay here a night and a day, and give me the knowledge that you have in you – the knowledge of men and of things. You vibrationing thing, then! You are warm! You have long life before you – a great expectation of days. But I know now that you are old as the fools count age. Speak: will you stay, and exchange with me secret for secret? For secrets you have in your heart.'

'I will stay until dusk and return after dark,' said Mrs Bradley, imitating the witch's oracular delivery.

'Wait till I wet the pot, then,' said Mother Harries, 'and we will drink tay together.'

'You've been on the stage,' said Mrs Bradley suddenly. Mother Harries, who was hobbling towards the door which led to the kitchen of her cottage, turned her head, and again gave the impression that she was looking Mrs Bradley straight in the face.

'Until my sight was reft from me,' she said. They drank very sweet black tea with a good dollop of gin in it, and then Mrs Bradley mentioned again the purpose of her errand. She not only wanted details of the life and exploits of Mary Toadflax; she wanted to see her magic book.

Lecky Harries did not deny that there was such a book, and she did not, in so many words, admit that she had it in her possession.

'Next time you come we will speak of it again,' she said; and Mrs Bradley could get no more out of her. There were several built-in cupboards in the two downstair rooms of the cottage, and others, Mrs Bradley surmised, in the bedrooms. One of them must house the precious book. She had a pretty good idea of its market value, and she was prepared to put on top of this a contribution which would satisfy the sentimental value that the book would have for her. She did not desire a bargain. She was aware that bargains were usually fraudulent either to the purchaser or the vendor.

'"Take what you want," says God, "and pay for it," 'she suddenly observed, with a chuckle. 'Next time I come, I should like, at any rate, to
see
the book. I should also be interested to hear how it came into your possession.'

'I inherited it,' replied Mrs Harries.

'Then we must be related.'

'Oh, I knew that directly you came in,' said the sightless old woman with conviction. As there was neither proof nor disproof of this statement, Mrs Bradley paid it the perfunctory attention of a 'Really?' and prepared to take her leave.

'Another cup?' said her hostess. Mrs Bradley declined gracefully. Very strong tea laced equally strongly with gin was not her usual afternoon beverage.

'I hope, madam,' said George, respectfully aware of something preoccupied in his employer's manner when she returned to the car, 'that your researches are about to be blessed.'

'Cursed, George,' said Mrs Bradley, as he arranged the rug over her knees. 'That elderly woman has the local reputation, didn't you tell me, of a witch?'

'That was pub talk, madam.'

'She also claims to be a relation of mine.'

'I wouldn't be greatly surprised at that, madam. I have often been aware of the eldritch in you.'

Mrs Bradley gazed at her man as stout Cortez gazed at the Pacific. George had often surprised her, but never more so than at this particular moment.

'George,' she said solemnly, 'you have hit it. And now, since there is not only the eldritch in me but a particularly nauseous witch's brew of strong sweet tea laced with gin, get me back to the house at once, and have the car ready again at ten o'clock to-night.'

*

'Well, go on, knock,' said Merrys. Skene tapped delicately on the cottage door with his bare and, by this time, cold knuckles. There was no reply.

'It isn't any good,' he said. 'I expect they've gone to bed.'

'There's a light downstairs, you ass.'

'I expect they left it on by mistake,' said Skene, who disliked the whole aspect of the situation in which they found themselves.

'Oh, rot. Here, let me try,' said Merrys, covering his knuckles with his school cap and then pounding vigorously on the door.

'I say, you know, they'll be pretty sick if they
have
gone to bed,' said Skene, nervously.

'Be your age,' retorted his friend; and pounded again. This time the sound of footsteps rewarded the bold effort. The door was opened by an old woman carrying a candle.

'Come in,' she said. 'The candle is to light you, not me. I require no illumination ever contrived by man. Step past me into the house, and sit down. When you have sat you may cross my palm with silver, if you will.'

Suddenly, over her shoulder, there appeared the face of another old woman; a yellow face with brilliant black eyes and a little beaky mouth now writhing back its lips in silent laughter.

Merrys turned, cannoned into his friend, gulped, and, cramming his cap on to his head, raced back to the hedge beside which they had left the bicycle. Just as they gained it a man loomed up in front of its headlamp and took the path through the open gateway between the ragged bushes.

'Good Lord!' said Merrys. 'Did you see who that was?'

'Of course I did,' said Skene, with the nervous anger of extreme dismay.

'He didn't recognize us, did he? Do you suppose he can pick us out in the morning?'

'Don't know. Hope not. We didn't have our caps on.'

'I did! I pulled it out to knock on that beastly door, and shoved it on when we bolted.'

'I say, you
are
an ass!'

'Well, who would expect to run into a beak out here at this time of night? Come on. It's no good beefing about it now. I don't honestly think he saw us.'

This opinion, delivered roundly, slightly comforted Skene. They ran with the bicycle down the dark road until they were out of breath.

'Ease up!' gasped Merrys, at last. 'He isn't following us. Where the heck do we go from here?'

They dropped to a walk and then were about to stop and mount when Merrys said, his hand to the breast-pocket of his jacket inside his waterproof coat:

'I've lost my fountain pen!'

'You've probably left it in your locker,' said Skene. 'Come on.'

'No, I haven't, you ass! I had it clipped into my pocket. I always carry it there.'

'Well, it'll have to stay lost,' observed Skene unsympathetically. 'I'm not going back to that beastly cottage to look for a fountain pen, and perhaps run into Spivvy again. Besides, we'd never find it in the dark.'

'But it was a jolly good pen. I had it for Christmas. I'm almost certain I must have dropped it in that garden. I had it out just before that, because it's got a torch at the end.'

'Well, hang it, we
can't
go back there again!'

'But if the Spiv finds it, we're sunk. It had my name on it, on a band round the barrel, and even an ass like Kay –'

'Oh, Lord!' said Skene, disgusted by this revelation. 'You really
are
an ass! Oh, well, come on, then. I suppose we'd
better
go back.'

But when they reached the cottage there were further terrors in store. The light in the little room seemed brighter, and in front of it they could see in silhouette a fiercely gesticulating figure, whose waving arms were casting a gigantic shadow on the blind. Suddenly an arm went through the window. There was the sound of the breaking glass, and then a voice, rough with fury.

'If I have to
hang
for him, I'll finish him, the swine! Here! Who the devil's that outside? I could swear I heard – oh, blast! I've cut my arm!'

The boys turned tail again.

'Did it sound like the Spiv's voice?' asked Skene, when they were well away from the house. 'Do you think that's who it was?'

'I suppose it must have been. I say, come on! Let's pedal as fast as we can along this road. It must lead
somewhere,
mustn't it?'

'Shouldn't think Kay would be the sort to talk about finishing people,' observed Skene, when the fever of fear and excitement had cooled with the difficulties of making progress uphill on the sandy and interminable road. 'Still, you can't tell, I suppose. After all, he's really a Dago. They do have funny tempers and all that.'

'Oh, those weak-kneed sort of asses always threaten what they're going to do, but they never dream of doing it. Always saying they'll report you to the Head, but they never do. I say, I wish we'd found that cursed fountain pen!'

The culprits, with the luck of the undeserving, came into the village at last, and, anxious now to get back to the House and to return Mr Loveday's bicycle, they were soon at the School gate.

'Better walk the bike past Spivvy's cottage, just in case,' muttered Skene.

'In case of what, you ass?'

'Well, in case anybody should hear us.'

'Be your age. There's nobody there to hear us. They don't keep a proper servant, and his missus is still on holiday. Issy told me. And we know where Spivvy is, anyway.'

'He might have got back himself by now.'

'Pigs might fly, but
he
didn't,' said the bold Merrys, still pedalling on. He stopped the bicycle as soon as they drew near the School buildings, however, and the two boys crept like cats towards Mr Loveday's kitchen garden.

They restored the borrowed property to its shed, and were rounding the side of the House preparatory to climbing into the dormitory when they saw a surprising sight. From the direction of Mr Loveday's Roman Bath, which lay at the far end of Big Field, could be seen two lights which might have been rather powerful will o' the wisps, or, mundanely, a couple of lanterns or electric torches.

'I say, what do you think that is?' asked Skene.

'I don't know. Somebody playing the fool. A.W.O.L. like us, I shouldn't wonder.'

'Would they use lights? Anyway, the water would be beastly cold. They only stoke it up two days a week, ready for first Thursdays, you know.'

'I
don't
know, then. Think we ought to go over and have a look?'

'No, I jolly well don't! It can't be burglars, because there's nothing to steal. Perhaps it's Nancy the Nark having her weekly tub!'

Merrys giggled at this well-worn and libellous jest, and the two boys, having skinned their knees but come to no other harm in climbing up to their dormitory, soon rejoined Eaves and Meyrick, the other occupants of the room.

'What was it like?' whispered Eaves.

'All right. Dry up,' responded Merrys.

'I say!' whispered Skene, raising his head from the pillow. 'Aren't we in luck? Hear that?'

What he had heard was the swishing down of the rain.

'Missed it by less than five minutes! Golly!' said Merrys. 'Been dashed awkward if we'd had to account for soaked clothes. I never thought of it raining! Did
you
, Skene?'

Skene said nothing. He took off his shoes, socks, and jacket, left them on the floor, and went to bed in his trousers. Merrys found pyjamas and struggled into them in the dark. 'Tell you in the morning,' he whispered as he crept between the sheets. 'We think there
might
be a murder.'