William The Outlaw (27 page)

The doctor and his wife turned to William for an explanation. Their expressions showed considerably less friendliness than they had shown before. William looked about him desperately. Even
escape seemed impossible. He felt that he would have welcomed any interruption. When, however, he saw Miss Polliter running towards them down the field he felt that he would have chosen some other
interruption than that.

‘Oh, there you are!’ panted Miss Polliter. ‘Such
dreadful
things have happened. Oh, there’s the dear boy. I don’t know what we should have done without him .
. . rescuing children and animals at the risk, I’m sure, of his own dear life. I must give you just a little present.’ She handed him a half-crown which William pocketed gratefully.

‘But, my dear Miss Polliter,’ said the doctor, deeply concerned, ‘you should be resting in your room. You should never run like that in your state of nervous exhaustion . . .
never.’

‘Oh, I’m quite well now,’ said Miss Polliter.

‘Well?’ said the doctor amazed and horrified at the idea.

‘HERE IS YOUR SON,’ SAID THE DOCTOR POMPOUSLY.

‘’IM?’ SHRIEKED THE WOMAN, ‘NEVER SEED ’IM BEFORE.’

‘The flood?’ said the doctor still more amazed and still more horrified.

‘Oh yes. The river’s risen and the whole place is flooded out,’ said Miss Polliter excitedly. ‘It’s a most stimulating experience altogether. We’ve saved a
lot of animals and two children.’

The doctor was holding his head.

‘Good heavens!’ he said. ‘Good heavens! Good heavens!’

At that moment two more women descended upon the group. They were the mothers of the infants. They had searched through the village for their missing offspring and at last an eye-witness had
described their deliberate kidnapping and imprisonment in the doctor’s house. They were demanding the return of their children. They were threatening legal proceedings. They were calling the
doctor a murderer and a kidnapper, a vivisectioner, a Hun and a Bolshevist.

The doctor and the doctor’s wife and Miss Polliter and the two mothers all began to talk at once. William, seizing his opportunity, crept away. He crept down the road towards the cave.

At the bend in the road he turned. The doctor and the doctor’s wife and the two mothers and Miss Polliter, still all talking excitedly at the same time, began to make their way slowly up
the hill to the doctor’s house.

He looked in the other direction. There was a large crowd surrounding the cave; men were just coming along the road from the other direction with pickaxes to dig his dead body from the rock.

He went forward very reluctantly and slowly.

He went forward because he had a horrible suspicion that the doctor would soon have discovered the extent and the cause of the ‘flood’ and would soon be pursuing him lusting for
vengeance.

He went forward reluctantly and slowly because he did not foresee an enthusiastic welcome from his bereaved parents.

Ginger saw him first. Ginger gave a piercing yell and pointed down the road towards William’s reluctant form.

‘There – he
is
!’ he shouted. ‘He’s not dead.’

They all turned and gaped at him open-mouthed.

William presented a strange figure. He seemed at first sight chiefly compounded of the two elements, earth and water.

He turned as if to flee but the figure of the doctor could be seen running down the road from his house after him; following the doctor were the doctor’s wife, the infants’ mothers
with the infants and Miss Polliter. Even at that distance he could see that the doctor’s face was purple with fury. Miss Polliter still looked bright and stimulated.

So William advanced slowly towards his gaping rescuers. ‘Here I am,’ he said. ‘I – I’ve got out all right.’

He fingered the half-crown in his pocket as if it were an amulet against disaster.

He felt that he would soon need an amulet against disaster.

‘Oh, where have you been?’ sobbed his mother, ‘where
have
you been?’

‘I got in a flood,’ said William, ‘an’ then I lost my memory.’ He looked round at the doctor who was running towards them and added with a mixture of fatalistic
resignation and bitterness, ‘Oh, well, he’ll tell you about it. I bet you’ll b’lieve him sooner than me an’ I bet he’ll make a different tale of it to what I
would.’

And he did.

But Miss Polliter (who left the doctor’s charge, cured, to his great disgust, the next day) persisted to her dying day that the river had flooded and that the hose pipe
had nothing to do with it.

And she sent William a pound note the next week in an envelope marked ‘For a brave boy’.

And, as William remarked bitterly, he jolly well deserved it. . . .

CHAPTER 10

I
T seemed to William and his friends the Outlaws as if school had been comparatively peaceful till Bertie appeared upon the scene. Bertie was the
headmaster’s nephew who had come to the school for a term only (which to some of his associates seemed long enough – if not too long) and stayed with his uncle. Unfortunately he was in
William’s form.

Everybody except William and his form agreed that Bertie was charming. He had a beautiful smile and beautiful manners. Old ladies were often heard to declare that he must have a beautiful soul.
He would recite beautiful poetry for hours on end without stopping. He had a beautiful conscience. It was his beautiful conscience that annoyed the Outlaws most. His beautiful conscience was always
making him tell his uncle anything that he thought his uncle ought to know. And the things which he thought his uncle ought to know were just the things which the Outlaws thought his uncle ought
not to know. For instance, Bertie thought that his uncle ought to know that the Outlaws were keeping white mice in their desks, while the Outlaws on the other hand did not consider it at all
necessary for his uncle to know this. Again, Bertie’s beautiful conscience forced him to tell his uncle that it was the Outlaws who had stitched up the sleeves of his gown so securely that he
had to go about for a whole morning without it, and this again the Outlaws did not consider it necessary for his uncle to know. Bertie thought that his uncle ought to know that it was the Outlaws
who, when a committee meeting was being held at the school, had changed the position of all the neatly printed little notices, ‘To the Committee room’, so that the committee, after
wandering desolately round and round the corridor, found themselves ultimately in the bootroom in the basement. All these things Bertie conscientiously reported to his uncle, and his uncle visited
the full force of his wrath upon the Outlaws.

The uncle, as a matter of fact, did not quite approve of Bertie’s beautiful conscience, but he could not resist the temptation to get a bit of his own back on the Outlaws. He’d
suffered in (comparative) silence from the Outlaws for so long. He’d always found it so difficult ever to lay the crimes for which he was certain that the Outlaws were responsible at the
Outlaws’ door, that it was impossible to resist the circumstantial evidence laid ready to his hand day by day by the conscientious Bertie. The result of all this was that the advent of Bertie
coincided with a period of what the Outlaws regarded as unmerited persecution for the Outlaws themselves. Sometimes idly on the way home from school the Outlaws laid tentative plans of vengeance
upon Bertie, but they never came to anything because the Outlaws tempered boldness with discretion. A mass attack upon the unctuous Bertie would be highly enjoyable, but the resultant interview
with Bertie’s uncle would be less so. The Outlaws cherished a deep respect for Bertie’s uncle’s right arm. They had come into pretty frequent contact with it, they were good
judges of its strength and they knew that it was not to be unduly provoked.

‘What it comes to,’ said William indignantly as they walked home discussing the situation, ‘what it comes to is that we simply can’t do
anythin
’
excitin’, not while he’s about, simply can’t do
anythin’ . . . .
’

‘There was yesterday,’ agreed Ginger disconsolately, ‘when he went an’ told old Markie that it was
me
what had put the hedgehog into Mr Hopkins’
desk.’

A blissful smile dawned upon William’s freckled countenance. ‘It was funny, wasn’t it?’ he said simply, ‘watchin’ him put his hand into the desk without
lookin’ to get his ruler out an’ then seein’ his face. . . .’

Ginger gave a constrained smile. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I daresay it seems funny to you. It seemed funny to me yesterday but you din’t have to go up to
him
about it this
mornin’. An’ that old Bertie grinnin’ at me all over the place afterwards. . . .’

‘Never mind,’ said Henry consolingly, ‘it’s only for a few weeks now. He’s goin’ at the end of the term.’

‘What worries me,’ said William slowly, ‘what worries me is lettin’ him go at the end an’ nothin’ happenin’ to him. I mean him goin’ round
makin’ trouble all over the place like this an’ then jus’ goin’ off at the end of the term an’
nothin
’ happenin’ to him.’

‘Let’s jus’ be glad he’s going off at all,’ said Douglas philosophically, ‘an’ never mind nothin’ happenin’ to him. Let’s jus’
be glad that things’ll stop happenin’ to
us.
’

‘’Sides,’ said Henry, ‘if we
did
do anythin’ to him . . . you know what he is . . . he’d tell
him
an’ then jus’ go about
grinnin’ at us. You know what he is.’

‘Yes,’ said William sadly and thoughtfully, ‘we know what he
is
, but – but it jus’ seems a pity, that’s all.’

It was the Vicar’s wife who first suggested the pageant, but once suggested the idea took root firmly in the village. Mrs Bott of the Hall took it up and so did Mrs Lane
and Mrs Franks and Mrs Robinson and all the rest of them.

Arrangements went on apace. The junior inhabitants of the village looked on with apathy. ‘No children to be in it’ had been pronounced very early on in the proceedings. The
activities of the Outlaws may have had something to do with the distrust with which the senior element of the village regarded the junior.

William and the Outlaws treated the whole affair with superior contempt.

‘A pageant!’ said William scornfully. ‘Huh! An ole
pageant.
Jus’ dressin’ up in silly clothes an’ having a procession. Jus’ a lot of silly ole
grown-ups. Huh! Well, I bet I could make a better pageant than that ole thing, if I tried. I
bet
I could. Well,
I
wun’t be in it not if they asked me. I’m
glad
they’ve not asked me ’cause I wun’t be in it not if they did.’

He was none the less disconcerted and secretly much annoyed to hear that despite the ban on children Bertie was to be in it. Bertie was to be Queen Elizabeth’s page.

Queen Elizabeth was Mrs Bertram of The Limes. She was a newcomer to the village and her most striking characteristic was a likeness to the Virgin Queen as represented in her more famous
portraits. She considered it a great social asset and was never tired of drawing attention to it. It was, as a matter of fact, Mrs Bertram who had first suggested the pageant to the Vicar’s
wife. And despite the reluctance of the committee and the ban they had placed on the younger generation, Mrs Bertram had insisted on having a boy page.

‘We’ve – er – never found it wise,’ objected the Vicar’s wife mysteriously.

‘But where I used to live,’ said Mrs Bertram indignantly, ‘we always had children in the pageants. Without exception. There’s something so romantic and beautiful about
children.’ Mrs Bertram, it is perhaps unnecessary to add, had no children of her own.

The Vicar’s wife cleared her throat and spoke again still mysteriously.

‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘Quite. But one or two occasions in this village have been spoilt –
wrecked
by the presence of certain children.’

‘The children of this village,’ said Mrs Franks still with something of the Vicar’s wife’s mysteriousness in her tone, ‘seem, I don’t know why, to bring bad
luck to anything they take part in—’