William The Conqueror (23 page)

The Chapel Sunday school was generally supposed to be better organised than the Church Sunday school. Certainly its pupils sat round quietly while a large man with a beard drew from the story of
Cain and Abel the moral that it is very wrong indeed to murder one’s only brother. But suddenly a faint, far-away sound reached this peaceful scene and the listeners pricked up their ears. It
was a strange sound – singing, shouting, the noise of a trumpet, the tramping of many feet were its component parts. It drew nearer. It roused a certain martial excitement in the breasts of
the bored Chapelites. It drew nearer still. The large man faltered in his graphic description of Cain’s brand. Then suddenly it happened . . .

The door burst open, and for just one second there was a clear view of a freckled boy carrying a banner inscribed ‘Down with Idyls’, another boy in a meat safe, and a crowd of boys
behind. Then all was confusion. They swarmed into the room with obviously hostile intent, and the Chapelites rose without hesitation and with gleeful abandon to close with them. The room suddenly
became an inferno of fighting, shouting boys. The man with the beard did what he could. His lesson on Cain and Abel seemed to have been pitifully wasted. Someone sent to fetch the Vicar and the
curate, and they came and also did what they could.

The curate joined the fray and thoroughly enjoyed himself. It was a much more exhilarating affair even to him than the lesson on the Athanasian Creed he had prepared. As I have remarked before,
he was a very young man. The Vicar received a butt in the abdomen and retired to the little room at the back to wait till it was over. He thought, and rightly, that this sort of thing was more in
the curate’s line than his. The man with the beard tried to calm the tumult by playing peaceful hymns on the harmonium, but that only seemed to inflame the combatants.

It was a glorious fight – a red-letter fight in the annals of the village, a fight which the combatants would describe to their children and children’s children. No one except the
Outlaws knew what they were fighting about. It was just a fight – a primitive fight – the surprise invasion of alien territory by one army and the defence of their native heath by the
other – the sort of fight that dates from pre-Homeric days – the sort of fight that rouses primitive emotion and satisfies dimly felt primitive needs.

It lasted an hour.

Mr Brown returned home on Monday morning shortly after breakfast.

He saw at once that something had gone wrong.

‘Everything gone all right?’ he said tactfully to his wife.

‘Oh,
no
, John,’ said Mrs Brown tearfully. ‘
Everything’s
gone wrong.’

‘For instance?’ said Mr Brown, surreptitiously glancing through the morning paper.

‘Well, I just heard from old Jenks, and he can’t come and cut up those logs for us this morning, and we’ve none to be going on with and – oh,
much
worse than
that—’

‘Yes?’ he prompted gently. ‘William—’

‘
Oh!
’ she gasped. ‘Have you heard?’

‘I’ve heard nothing,’ he said dryly. ‘I’m merely suggesting the most unlikely source of trouble I could think of.’

‘It’s
awful
, John,’ moaned Mrs Brown, ‘the most
terrible
thing happened yesterday. I’m afraid William’s got religious mania.’

She told him the story, and just the flicker of a smile passed over Mr Brown’s countenance. He folded up his paper.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it sounds like the sort of religious mania that can be treated at home. Where is the Lion Heart?’

‘The Lion H – You mean William?’

‘I mean William.’

‘I think he’s upstairs.’

Mr Brown stepped into the hall.

‘William!’ he called.

‘Yes, father,’ answered William meekly, with the old, old attempt to propitiate outraged Authority by a tone of deferential humility.

But Mr Brown’s voice was suavely polite.

‘Can you spare me a minute?’

William’s heart sank. Of his father suavely polite and his father furiously angry, he much preferred the latter. Of course, it hurt at the time, but it was soon over. He realised, however,
that in the matter of parental manners, offenders can’t be choosers.

He came slowly downstairs. His father led him out into the back garden where lay a pile of logs.

‘Here are some idols for you to demolish, William,’ he said pleasantly.

‘They’re not idols,’ said William.

‘No, but you can imagine they are. You can work off your crusading energy on them without, I may add, the assistance or the company of your friends. You know the size we have them chopped
into, don’t you?’

William glared furiously at the logs. Had chopping the logs been forbidden, William’s soul would have yearned to chop them. Had the chopping been an act of wanton destruction it would have
appealed immeasurably to William’s barbarian spirit. But the chopping was a task enjoined on him by Authority. So William loathed it.

‘You mean chop ’em all up?’ he said at last in horror.

‘I see you’re beginning to get the idea, William,’ said his. father encouragingly. ‘Your brain works slowly but surely.’

‘B-but,’ said William, ‘it’ll take me all morning.’

‘That is precisely the idea, William,’ said Mr Brown. ‘As it happens, I’m not going to the office today, so I can keep a friendly eye on you from the morning-room window
and see how you’re getting on.’

And it did take him all morning. And all morning Mr Brown sat comfortably reading in an easy-chair at the morning-room window.

That is why, when anyone mentions crusades or crusaders, a bitter, bitter look comes into William’s face.

CHAPTER 11

I
T was arranged that William was to give a party. Neither William nor his parents particularly wanted to give a party, but it was demanded by the
social code.

Certain boys had asked William to their parties, and William, responding reluctantly to pressure applied by Authority, had attended those parties; therefore, whether William wanted to
or not, William must have a party to ‘ask back’ the boys whose parties he had attended. As a matter of fact, he was more ready to fulfil his social duty this year than he generally
was.

Robert and Ethel, William’s elder brother and sister, had given a party, and so William was eager to show himself as good as they and have a party too. Robert’s and Ethel’s
party certainly had not been an unqualified success, chiefly owing to the fact that William had mistaken one of their guests for a burglar and kept him imprisoned in the greenhouse for part of the
evening, but William considered that his mistake had been quite justifiable and that it was silly to have let a little thing like that spoil a party.

William left all the arrangements of his party in his mother’s hands – except the invitations, upon which he kept an anxious and rather distrustful eye. He had a deep suspicion that
his mother would sacrifice his pride on the altar of the social code by inviting some of his deadly enemies to his party just because their mothers had asked her to lunch or Ethel knew their elder
sister, or some equally futile reason.

Mothers never seem to realise the serious and deadly nature of a school feud. They say such things as, ‘Yes, dear, you may not like him, but I think you ought to try to love
everyone,’ or ‘I think we
must
have him to tea, dear, because his mother sent in those nice flowers from her garden last week.’

The origin of the feud between William and his supporters and Hubert Lane and his supporters was, as they say in history books, hidden in the mists of antiquity. No one knew exactly when or how
it had arisen. It seemed to have been there from time immemorial – a heaven-sent institution to enliven the monotony of school life by fights and ambushes and guerilla warfare. School life
would be dull indeed without such occasional relaxations.

William kept an eye upon the invitation list for his party because he was afraid that a Hubert Lanite might somehow creep upon it unobserved – a Hubert Lanite whose parents, with mistaken
zeal, would probably force him to attend the festivity – and then trouble would ensue.

But the feud was a feud of many years’ standing, and Mrs Brown, who had suffered more than once in her well-intentioned attempts to act as peacemaker, was quite willing to humour William
in this, and no Hubert Lanites were asked, though, to William’s horror, Mrs Lane sent in a pot of her home-made chutney to Mrs Brown just a week before the party.

For a few hours, in which the fate of the world seemed to tremble in the balance, Mrs Brown hesitated, but on William’s hinting darkly that if Hubert Lane came to the party he, William,
would not attend it in any circumstances or in any capacity, she decided to ask Mrs Lane to tea instead and explain to her how much they were all hoping to see darling Hubert at William’s
party next year.

When the week before the party arrived, William allowed his mind to set itself at rest. All the invitations had been sent out and the answers received, and the list remained pure and unspotted
from the Hubert Lanites.

William himself behaved with a certain amount of circumspection. When he met a Hubert Lanite he contented himself with a boxing match or merely the hurling of those primitive vituperations so
dear to boyhood. (Such as, ‘Oh, it’s you, is it? Sorry – I thought jus’ at first it was a monkey!’) It was William’s prospective guests who made the mistake.
They could not keep themselves from taunting the Hubert Lanites with the fact that they had not been invited to William’s party. They impressed the fact of William’s party so deeply on
the Hubert Lanites that William’s party seemed to loom in their minds as the only important event of the year.

William began to have an uneasy suspicion that the Hubert Lanites were planning some coup. They talked together in little groups. They laughed – nasty, sniggering, secret laughs, as if in
anticipation of some future joyful triumph. William looked forward to his party with a certain amount of apprehension. A boy who is giving a party is at a disadvantage in dealing with his foes.
‘I hope it’ll go off all right,’ he muttered the night before.

‘Well, it’s got more chance than most people’s,’ said Robert bitterly. ‘I suppose you won’t mess up your own party as you mess up most things.’

‘No, but somebody else might,’ said William darkly.

Ginger arrived first, and it was Ginger who announced the fact that the Hubert Lanites were concealed among the bushes in William’s garden engaged in the enjoyable occupation of jeering
from the darkness at each exquisitely dressed guest as he or she stood in the light of the porch on the front steps waiting to be admitted.

Soft cries of, ‘Oh, my!’ ‘Oh, cripes! Look at
him.
Someone’s washed his face for him.’ ‘Oh, look at his hair. He’s been an’ put treacle on
it.’ ‘Oh, isn’t she bee-utiful!’ ‘Watch this one! Isn’t he
lovely!
He’s got new shoes with bows on.’ ‘There’s old Douglas –
Dun’t he look hungry? He’s wondering what they’ve got for supper. Not much, poor old Douglas – they’ve not got much. We’ve had a look through the
window.’

The guests entered one by one, embarrassed and indignant. They were only restrained from hurling themselves into the bushes to mortal combat by memories of frequently repeated maternal
injunctions as to their party clothes and party manners. William made loud complaints to his family and insisted on the necessity of his leading his party out into the night to do battle with the
enemy, but Mrs Brown was firm.

‘No, William, you’re most
certainly
not to,’ she said. ‘I shan’t think of it. I never heard such an idea. Going out fighting in the garden, indeed, at a
party. Well I can’t help it. They’re very rude little boys, that’s all I can say, but you must take no notice of them. Simply behave as if they weren’t there. That’s
the only dignified thing to do.’

‘But I don’t
wanter
do anything dignified,’ persisted William. ‘I wanter
fight
’em.’

‘Most
certainly
not, William,’ said Mrs Brown. ‘If your father were here, of course—’

Her tone implied that Mr Brown would have made short work of the Hubert Lanites. But Mr Brown was a wise man, and when any of his offspring were giving parties went out to spend the evening with
a friend.

William appealed to Robert, but Robert was unsympathetic.

‘It’s a pity,’ he said, ‘if someone messes up your party, but, when all’s said and done, you messed up ours.’

‘Yes, but I
thought
he was a burglar,’ said William, with exasperation in his voice.

When Robert, however, showed himself at the front door for a minute he was greeted with loud murmurs of mock admiration and ribald derision from the darkness. Robert’s dress suit was not
of long standing, and he still felt self-conscious in it. He flung himself furiously in the direction of the murmur, tripped over something, and fell full length into a laurel bush. The murmur
changed to a muffled pæan of joy and triumph.

Robert went indoors and slammed the door, and then went upstairs to change his shirt. He felt that he disliked his younger brother’s friends more than he had ever disliked them in his life
before.

Downstairs William and his friends were making a sincere effort to forget the presence of their enemies outside, but it happened that the drawing-room curtains had been taken down because the
conjuror who was to perform afterwards in the morning-room, wanted them, and so William and his guests in the drawing-room felt themselves exposed to the unsympathetic and mocking gaze of countless
Hubert Lanites lurking in the bushes.

Over the proceedings there was a strange air of constraint. In every youthful breast seethed only a bloodthirsty desire to sally forth into the night in search of vengeance. Failing this, they
didn’t want to do anything else. They were certainly not going to play silly games or dance silly dances or do anything that might give their watching enemies outside further handles against
them.

They, were painfully conscious of unseen but all-seeing eyes outside noting their every movement for possible derisive reproduction on future occasions. The safest thing was to disappoint them
by having no movements and speaking as little as possible. They refused to play games or dance at all.