William The Conqueror (25 page)

‘IT’S SO NICE TO SEE A BOY LIKE YOU TAKING AN INTEREST IN THIS SUBJECT,’ SAID THE FAT OLD LADY KINDLY. ‘I’M SURE YOU’LL ENJOY IT.’

Moreover, it had been easier to get in than it would be to get out. He doubted whether he could push past the fat lady and gentleman. He doubted whether he dare stir in this densely packed,
breathlessly silent room. He was sure they’d turn him back at the door, even if he got as far as that.

But he decided to have a jolly good try. He remembered a device that had occasionally secured him a temporary retreat from a tight corner in school. He clapped his handkerchief to his nose as
though that organ had suddenly begun to bleed, rose hastily, walked over the fat lady’s toes, fell over the fat gentleman’s umbrella, scrambled up and fled down the room. To his
surprise and relief, no one barred his way or questioned the sanguinity of his nose.

The lecturer was slightly put out by the incident, but quickly recovered himself and continued his discourse. He was discoursing now on Kant. Ginger looked at William’s empty seat. What
William had done he could do. As the lecturer was raising his right hand to emphasise the fact that Kant often offends against his own principles, Ginger clapped his handkerchief to his nose and
followed his leader’s example, even to the lady’s toes and the gentleman’s umbrella. Hardly had the door closed on him when Douglas, his handkerchief to his nose, made his hasty
and noisy exit.

Henry was left alone. He had not acted quickly enough. He felt certain that no one in the room would believe that his nose was bleeding if he put his handkerchief to that organ and followed his
friends now. But – he brightened. There were other bodily afflictions. Puffing out one cheek to its fullest extent, clapping his hand to it and assuming what he fondly imagined to be an
expression of extreme agony, he started from his seat and rushed from the room.

He did not stop till he had reached the garden. There among the bushes crouched William, Ginger and Douglas. They hailed him with joy.

‘Look what I’ve got,’ said William gleefully, ‘found it on the hatstand.’

In the light from the hall he proudly displayed his trophy. It was Hubert Lane’s school cap. Every schoolboy knows that the filching of his cap is the deadliest insult that can be offered
him.

‘Let’s go home quick,’ said Douglas.

‘Jus’ a minute,’ said William.

A light came from an open window on the other side of the house. William crept round to this noiselessly, followed by the others.

From the lighted window came a boy’s voice.

‘I am looking forward to your party next Thursday, Hubert,’ and Hubert’s answer:

‘Well, don’t you tell anyone it’s next Thursday anyway.’

The Outlaws went home. And as they went they lifted up their strong young voices and chanted:

‘Thursday! It’s going to be next Thursday! It’s goin’ to be next Thursday.’

But next Thursday is another story.

CHAPTER 12

T
HE Christmas holidays had arrived and William and the other Outlaws whooped their way home from school at the unusual hour of 11 a.m., to the
unaffected dismay of their families. They had listened to a stirring address from their form master (who felt as little regret at parting from the Outlaws as the Outlaws felt at parting from him),
but they had been more intent upon the unauthorised distribution and mastication of a bag of nuts they had bought on the way to school than upon the high ideals which their form master was holding
up for them, and so missed many words of counsel and inspiration which might (or might not) have made a difference to their whole lives.

Anyway, having finished the nuts (and deposited the shells in the satchel of their enemy, Hubert Lane), the Outlaws leapt out of the school buildings and whooped and scuffled and shouted their
way home.

‘We’ve broke up!’ yelled William, as he entered the hall, and flung his satchel with a clatter upon the floor.

Mrs Brown came out of the morning-room, rather pale at this invasion of her usual morning quiet.

‘I – I’d forgotten you were breaking up today, William,’ she said. Her tone betrayed no ecstatic joy at the realisation of the fact.

William turned a somersault, and came into violent collision with a small table which held a vase of flowers.

‘Sorry,’ said William, still cheerfully, as he repaired the damage as best he could. (That is to say, he picked up the table, replaced the vase on it, picked up the flowers, put them
in the vase – mostly wrong way up – and rubbed the spilt water into the carpet with his foot.)

‘Oh, don’t, William!’ moaned his mother. ‘I’ll ring for Emma – your boots are so dirty.’

‘Sorry,’ said William again, slightly hurt, ‘I was only tryin’ to help.’

‘Haven’t – haven’t you come home rather early?’ said Mrs Brown.

‘No,’ said William heartily, ‘we always come out this time breaking-up mornings. We’ve broke up.’ He chanted on a note that made Mrs Brown draw her brows together,
and raise her hands to her ears.

‘William
darling
,’ she said plaintively. Then, ‘What are you going to do, dear – just till lunch-time, I mean?’

There was a note of resigned hopelessness in her voice. Mrs Brown was a woman without any political ambition whatever, but if Mrs Brown had been put in charge of the Education Department of the
Government for a month, she would have made several drastic changes without any hesitation. She would have made a law that no holidays should last longer than a week, and if they did, free
treatment for nervous breakdown was to be provided for all mothers of families, and that on ‘break-up days’ school should continue until late in the evening. Mrs Brown considered it
adding insult to injury to send children home at eleven o’clock in the morning on the last day of term.

‘Er – what are you going to do till lunch, dear?’ said Mrs Brown again.

William considered the possibilities of the universe.

‘I might go into the garden an’ practise with my bow and arrow,’ he said.

‘Oh,
no
, dear,’ said Mrs Brown, closing her eyes, ‘please don’t do that! It does annoy your father so when the windows get broken.’

‘
Oh!
’ said William indignantly. ‘I keep explainin’ about that. I wasn’t aimin’ at that window. It was just that my hand slipped jus’ when I was
shootin’ it off. I was aimin’ at somethin’ quite diff’rent.’

‘Yes, dear,’ said Mrs Brown, ‘but your hand might slip again.’

‘No, I don’t think it will,’ said William hopefully. ‘I’ll try an’ keep it steady – and it doesn’t always break windows, you know, even when it
slips.’

‘No,’ said Mrs Brown. ‘
Not
the bow and arrows, William,’ and added with consummate tact, ‘You don’t want to risk breaking things so near Christmas, you
know, William.’

There was certainly some sense in that. It was an argument that appealed to William.

‘Well,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘there’s the airgun. It’s quite different from the bow and arrows,’ he put in hastily. ‘I think p’raps I oughter
keep on practisin’ with the airgun, in case there’s another war.’

‘No, William,’ said Mrs Brown. ‘
Not
the airgun.’ Then tentatively and without much hope, ‘You – you wouldn’t like to do a little quiet school
work, would you, William dear, so as to keep your hand in for next term?’

‘No, thank you,’ said William quite firmly.

‘I think it would be rather a good idea,’ said Mrs Brown, still clinging to the vision of peace that the proposal summoned up to her eyes.

William considered for a moment in gloomy silence the vision of unadulterated boredom that the proposal summoned up to his eyes. Then he brightened.

‘I don’t think so, mother,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t think it fair on the other boys to go workin’ in the holidays.’

While Mrs Brown was slowly recovering from this startling vision of William conscientiously refraining from holiday work for the sake of his class-mates, William had yet another idea.

‘S’pose I try to mend that clock that’s gone wrong – the one in the dining-room,’ he said brightly.

Mrs Brown groaned again. William had hoped that she’d forgotten the last occasion he’d tried to mend a clock, but she hadn’t.

William had certainly succeeded in reducing it into its component parts, but having done that had not been able to resist the temptation of trying to make a motor-boat of the component parts,
and when finally they were taken to the clock-maker, it was discovered that three or four important component parts were missing.

William suspected a duck who had been on the pond when William had launched his motor-boat and the pond had taken the motor-boat to its bosom. William insisted that he had salvaged all the parts
that the muddy bosom of the pond could be induced to yield, and that if there were any missing that duck must have eaten them.

William watched the duck with morbid interest for some days and imagined several times that it looked pale and unhappy. Anyway, the upshot of it all was that William’s father had to buy a
new clock, and that William went without pocket-money for several months. But all this had been more than a year ago. William wished that the memories of grown-ups were not so inordinately long.
He’d have liked to try his hand at a clock again.

‘No, William,’ said Mrs Brown, ‘most certainly not.’

‘Well, what shall I do?’ said William, slightly aggrieved.

Mrs Brown had an idea.

‘Well, William, it’s so near Christmas time – wouldn’t you like to be thinking out some little presents for people?’

‘I’ve hardly any money,’ said William, and added enigmatically, ‘what with windows and things.’

‘Well,’ said Mrs Brown encouragingly, ‘it isn’t the money you spend on them that people value. It’s the thought behind it. I’m sure that with a little thought
you could make some very nice presents for your relations and friends.’

William considered the idea in silence for some minutes. Then he brightened. It seemed to appeal to him.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll go an’ think upstairs, shall I?’

Mrs Brown drew a breath of relief.

‘Yes, William,’ she said, ‘I think that will be very nice.’

The plan seemed to succeed beyond Mrs Brown’s fondest dreams. She did not see or hear of William for the rest of the morning. It was almost as if he were still at school. He appeared at
lunch, but was silent and thoughtful. A sense of peace stole over Mrs Brown.

After lunch, Ethel and Robert came to her in the morning-room.

‘I say,’ said Robert in a mystified voice, ‘I thought William was breaking up today.’

‘He is,’ said Mrs, Brown, ‘he has broken up. He came home about eleven o’clock.’

‘He’s very quiet,’ said Ethel lugubriously.

Mrs Brown smiled a fond, maternal smile. ‘Dear little boy,’ she said. ‘He’s upstairs thinking out his Christmas presents to people.’

‘Well,’ said Robert, ‘let’s make the most of it, and talk over the party.’

Robert and Ethel were giving a party to their friends, and William was being let into it as little as possible. Mingled with an elder brother and sister’s instinctive feeling that the
admission of a small schoolboy brother into their plans would in some way cheapen the whole thing was an equally instinctive fear of William. Pies in which William had a finger had a curious way of
turning into something quite unexpected. William could generally prove that it had nothing to do with him, but still – the result was the same.

So Robert’s and Ethel’s party was a ‘secret’, only to be discussed when William was safely out of the way. William, of course, knew that it was to take place and
professed an utter indifference to it, while privately he spent a good deal of time and ingenuity trying to ferret out the details of it. So far they had managed to keep secret from him the fact
that after supper there was going to be a short one-act play.

Ethel and Robert had lately joined the Dramatic Society and at present no function of any kind was complete to them without a one-act play. The shining lights of the Dramatic Society (including
Ethel and Robert) were going to take part in the play. They kept this part of it particularly a secret from William, because William rather fancied himself both as actor and playwright, and they
felt that if William knew that a play was going to take place under his roof it would be practically impossible to protect the play from the devastating effects of William’s interest in
it.