Chapter III (1)

Corkey minimus saw Milly once or twice before the fight, and he said he couldn’t make out whether she was going mad or what. One minute she wanted him to fight, the next she implored him not to; one minute she hoped he would mutilate Bray to pieces, the next she blubbed and prayed him if ever he had any liking for her to give Bray “best.” She said she kept dreaming of him brought back stark and stiff; and then, when he began to think she meant it, she called him her “knight” and her “hero” and her “King Arthur” and other frightful rot, and actually wanted him to wear one of her Sunday gloves under his shirt at the time of fighting! Corkey minimus said he very likely wouldn’t wear a shirt; and then she thought he might hang it--I mean the glove--round his neck by a bit of string!

“Blessed if I shall ever feel quite the same to her after this,” said Corkey.

“It seems rather rough to get broken up for life to please a skimpy girl,” I said. Then he burst out as red in the face as an apple, and told me he would not hear a word against Milly, so I dried up.

There were three days before the fight, and Corkey minimus trained for it, and gave away his pudding at dinner in exchange for the meat of the chaps who sat next to him. But you can’t get your muscle up in a day or two like that, and it only made him awfully thirsty.

The day came at last, and I may as well go on to the fight itself. The First were having a big match on our own ground, so nobody paid any attention to us, and we arranged a game that should have Corkey, Bray, and me on the same side. Then, when our chaps were in, we three sneaked away into the plantations, behind some holly-trees and a woodstack. Bray arranged all the preliminaries as cheerful as a bird, and Blanchard said they were right. They marked out a ring and ran a string round and arranged corners for the seconds; and I saw that the obscene Fowle had towels and bottles of water and a basin--all, of course, for Bray between the rounds. Corkey minimus was rather waxy with me for not bringing the same for him; but I’d brought a sponge, which I know is a thing a second chucks up in the air when his man is done for; and I explained and showed it to Corkey; and he thanked me and said he supposed that was about the only thing he should want. Blanchard said the rounds were to be two minutes long each, and Bray grumbled because they ought by rights to be three. But Blanchard told him to shut up and begin. When we saw Bray take his shirt off I told Corkey he ought to, and he did. Then Blanchard laughed and said:

“By gum! they peel rather different!”

Bray was like a barrel, with muscles a lot bigger than hen’s eggs on his arms. Corkey minimus seemed to be all ribs somehow, with arms about as lean as rulers. I told him to keep moving about and try and puff Bray a bit if he had time, and he said:

“All right, I’ll try. If I can get a smack at his face, so as to black an eye or something, and show I’ve hit him before he does for me, I don’t care.”

I will say for Corkey minimus that he had about the best pluck I ever saw in a chap. He was quite calm, and just his usual color; and when Bray tossed him for corners Corkey won; and Blanchard said I picked the right corner for him. Then he told them to fight fair, and said “Time!”

I’d prayed Corkey to try and surprise Bray at the very start if he could, and have a hit at Bray’s face the moment they began. And I’m blessed if he didn’t go and do it! Bray began fiddling about jolly scientifically with his hands, and I fancy he just squinted down to see if his feet were scientific too. At the same moment Corkey buzzed round his right and let Bray have it fairly on the nose. Bray jumped and looked about as much surprised as if he’d been struck by lightning; and Blanchard said:

“First blood for Corkey minimus!”

I yelled--I oughtn’t to have, but I did--because to see blood dropping about on Bray’s chest was a fine sight. He sniffed and went for Corkey smiling. The smile was the beastliest part of it, for I hoped he would have got his wool off a bit and been wild. But he wasn’t, and when he began to hit, Corkey got flustered and swung about like a windmill and caught it pretty hot. Yet he jerked his head so jolly quick that he didn’t get more than about four smacks on it in the first round, though his body, which was white by nature, was pretty soon covered with red marks. He said they didn’t hurt, and I cleaned him up and blew water over him at the end of the round. His lip was bleeding like mad, but luckily inside, where his tooth had cut it; and he swallowed all the blood, so nobody knew; besides which the blood wasn’t lost. Bray flung himself down in his corner, and Fowle looked after him; and even at a solemn time like that I laughed, and so did Corkey minimus, because Fowle tried to be too clever, and spurted a lot of water out of his mouth into Bray’s eye. Then Bray told him that after the fight he’d tie him in knots and kick him, looking forward to which, of course, wrecked Fowle’s enjoyment entirely.

Blanchard said “Time!” again awfully soon, and I saw Bray meant settling Corkey now, because his reputation as a fighter was at stake, and he knew Corkey hoped to get through three rounds with luck. So Bray began hitting him like hammers, and though I was about as sorry for Corkey minimus as a chap could be, nobody would have been able to help admiring the way Bray hit. It was just at the end of this round, when Corkey had been knocked down once, but got up again, that the awful rum thing with Milly Dunston happened.

Suddenly, without any warning, there was a noise like fowls getting up a hedge, and she rushed out from behind the woodstack with her eyes blazing and her hair streaming like a comet in a bate. She’d been running a good way, I should think, and she tore right into the ring straight at Bray, and not trusting to words at a time like that, and not remembering her father was a clergyman, or anything, slapped his face both sides, and jolly hard too. Bray swore the horriblest words I ever heard used by a chap, because she’d given him more in half a second than Corkey could have in a year. Then he got into his shirt upside-down and hooked it with Fowle, but not before he heard her say:

“You little, fat, red-headed coward to fight and try and murder a boy half your age and size! I wish I could kill you, I do. It’s shameful to think you’re an English boy at all!”

Then she turned on the chaps from the Fifth, and told Blanchard he was a disgrace to the school. So they cleared out too; and then she cried over Corkey, and said she would rather have been torn to pieces by unchained monsters than have let him be mangled like he was. And Corkey, who was pretty well dazed, forgave her, and told her kindly to go away. And she gasped and gurgled, and went.

I took Corkey back, and one or two things got to be known. It came out that Fowle had told Milly the place and the hour of the fight, but only after she had sworn--on some rotten saint Fowle knew--that she would not tell a single soul about it. She kept her swear all right, but came herself. And when Bray got to hear how it was she came--of course, thinking Corkey had told her, which he would rather have died than do--then Bray tried a lot of Chinese tortures on Fowle that he’d seen at a wax-works. And chaps who saw it said that Fowle was so excited at the time that he called upon about twenty different well-known Bible characters by name to come and help him and destroy Bray. But they didn’t.

As for Corkey minimus, the things he got from Milly after that fight you wouldn’t believe. There were bottles of stuff to rub bruises with, and lozenges and grapes, and some muck for his eye, and little baskets of strawberries, and jolly books and rosebuds. She told the Doctor about slapping Bray’s face, and wrote a long letter of apology afterwards; and a week later she broke it to Corkey minimus that she was going to a boarding-school herself next term; which she did.

When Corkey told me about it he added:

“And she’s going to write me letters, because she’s said several times that there’s only one chap in the world for her now, and I’m the chap.”

“I shouldn’t think she could change her mind after all that’s happened,” I said.

And Corkey minimus said:

“I bet she will when Corkey minor turns up again, especially if he brings rum things with him from Australia. And you needn’t repeat it, but to you, McInnes, as my chum, I say that I don’t care how soon he does come back either.”

Which showed that there was more sense in Corkey minimus than you might have thought.

The Piebald Rat

It was all the result of old Briggs asking the Doctor if he might “instil the lads with a wholesome fondness for natural history.” That’s how he put it, because I heard him; and the Doctor said it was an admirable notion, and would very probably keep some boys out of mischief on half-holidays. It also kept some boys out of bounds on half-holidays; and after a time I think the Doctor was pretty savage with old Briggs, and wished he’d stuck to his regular work, which was writing and drawing and such like; because, when one or two of the chaps really got keen about natural history, and even chucked cricket for butterflies and beetles, others, who didn’t care a straw about it, pretended they did to gain their own ends. And it was these chaps, if you understand, who finally made the Doctor so sick with natural history generally and old Briggs for starting it.

My chum, West, began the rage for study of “our humble relations,” as old Briggs called everything down to wood-lice. He let it be generally known that he had two live lizards in his desk; and, this being the best thing that West had ever thought of, the idea caught on well. I had a dormouse myself, my name being Ashby minor, and Ashby major kept a spider pretty nearly as big as a young bird, which he had poked out of a hole in the playground wall. He caged it in a tin match-box, and fed it with blue-bottles and wasps. At least, he got blue-bottles and wasps for it, but the fool wouldn’t eat them; and after a week he found it with its legs all tucked up as neatly as anything. Only it was dead. I thought the match-box must have been too tight a fit for it, but Ashby major did not. He believed there was something about a tin match-box which must be rather poisonous for out-door spiders.

Then chaps went on collecting till it got to be swagger to keep big live things in your desk; and the bigger the thing the more swagger it was.

Maine, generally known as Freckles, had a couple of guinea-pigs in his desk for a week. Then Mannering, the classical master in the Fifth, who must have had a nose like a gimlet, smelt them at prayers, happening to come in late and kneeling down by Freckles at the time. The Doctor didn’t make much fuss then, because that was just at the beginning of the business; only he said a desk was not the place for guinea-pigs, and added that a chap in Freckles’s position in the school ought to have known it. He let the gardener look after them from that time forward. But Freckles naturally lost all interest in them after the gardener had them; because a guinea-pig merely _as_ a guinea-pig is nothing. Anyhow, it was rough on him to be landed over it, because, as a matter of fact, guinea-pigs have no scent worth mentioning, and nobody but Mannering would have spotted them. After that Gideon and Brookes caught a blind-worm one foot two inches long; and Gideon sold his half for fivepence, so Brookes got it all. Nobody knew what a blind-worm likes to eat, unfortunately, and it died, but not for a fortnight. Then there was another scene with my dormouse, which led to tremendous things. There’s a hole in a desk where the ink-pot goes in, and one day my mouse got out through it, having climbed up two dictionaries and a Greek Testament to do so. It happened old Briggs himself was taking the Lower Fourth, which is my class, and I hoped it would be all right. But he didn’t seem friendly over it, and I noticed, when he told us to find the mouse, he put his feet upon the rungs of his chair. It’s a rum thing about old Briggs that he doesn’t care much for natural history objects while they’re alive; he likes them dead and dried, or stuffed and pinned on cards, or in glass cases all labelled and neat. My dormouse gave us a jolly good hunt round, then it finally tripped over a lead-pencil and got its tail and hind legs into West’s ink. So we caught it, and I was drying it with a piece of blotting-paper, and old Briggs was just telling us that dormice belong to a genus of rodents called Myoxus, and are allied to mice, though they have a squirrel’s habits, which he seemed to think was a pity, when Dunston came in. The Doctor asked particulars, looked as if he could have jolly well killed my mouse, which was shivering rather badly owing to the ink on its hinder parts, and said once for all that he would allow no animals of any kind inside any of the desks or in school.

Then, unluckily, as an afterthought, he demanded a clearance on the spot; and he was pretty well staggered to find the result.

“I will ask you, Ferrars, as head boy of the class, and one, I am happy to think, above any of this childish folly, to inspect the desks, one by one, and report to me where you find indications of life,” said the Doctor.

Ferrars is always right with the Doctor, chiefly because he has a face like a stone angel in church, and a very smooth voice, and a remarkably swagger knowledge of the Scriptures. He is also a tremendous worker, and will go into the Upper Fourth next term as sure as eggs. It was jolly awkward for Ferrars then, because he happened to be one of the keenest natural history chaps of all, and had a piebald rat, which even fellows in the Sixth had offered him half-a-crown and three shillings for, yet he would not part with it. So, though we didn’t like him much, we felt almost sorry for the fix he was in now. Of course, we thought that such a demon on Religious Knowledge as Ferrars would drag out his piebald rat right away, and perhaps even give it to the Doctor, or offer to sell it for the alms-box; but he didn’t. He got up, rather white about the gills, and opened the desks one by one; and a jolly happy family it was. Only the Doctor scattered the things to the four winds, till there wasn’t an atom of natural history left in the whole class-room except Ferrars’s piebald rat, snug in his desk.

First Fowle, who goes in for water things, had to empty his jam-jar of tadpoles out into the playground, which was a beastly cruel thing to make him do, because they all died, still being in the gill stage; then Freckles was sent off with a young rabbit to the hay-field, and he got caned too, because, strangely enough, the Doctor hadn’t forgotten his guinea-pigs; and Morrant’s two sparrows were let go, which was no kindness to them, because Morrant had cut their wings so jolly short it would have taken them months to grow enough feathers to fly with, and meantime a cat got them both; and Playfair’s mole, which, by-the-way, had been queer for some time, owing to having no earth to burrow in, was ordered to be sent to the cricket-field. There were a lot of other things, but Corkey minimus scored rather, because his goat-sucker moth laid a hundred and fourteen eggs on Todhunter’s algebra a few hours before it was let free. Corkey minimus says a goat-sucker moth’s nothing worth mentioning after it’s laid eggs, but the eggs turn into fine caterpillars.

The few things the Doctor didn’t know what to do with, and didn’t like to have killed, he said must be given to the gardener. He thought it would be better to put my mouse out of its misery, and turned it over on my hand with a gold pencil-case, and said it had probably got a chill to its vital organs and would die; but old Briggs explained that it might live if put in cotton-wool; so the gardener looked to it, and it did live, and I took it home at the end of that term, and have it still, though it is getting oldish now, and has lost half its tail. But it’s a good mouse yet.

Of course the extraordinary thing was Ferrars. After the Doctor had gone, old Briggs, to whom he had whispered something before he went, gave out that his natural history half-hours would be suspended for the rest of the term; then I got a word with Ferrars. I said:

“However did you have the cheek--you supposed to be such a saint?”

He said:

“I don’t know. Something came over me to do it. I’ve got a jolly peculiar feeling to that rat. It’s not an ordinary rat. I’m wrapped up in it. Even my respect for the Doctor couldn’t stand against it. I know what you chaps think. I dare say you reckon I’m a hound, but I couldn’t help doing what I did. Somehow that rat’s a sort of ‘mascotte’ to me. A mascotte’s a thing that brings luck. All my best luck’s happened since I had it.”

Of course, when a chap goes on like that, what can you do? I didn’t understand Ferrars. He seemed to me to be simply talking rot. So I said:

“Well, it’s pretty measly, considering the opinion the Doctor’s got of you. I sha’n’t try to score off your rat, because I know it’s a jolly fine one, and I like it; but Freckles or somebody will very likely kill it after this.”

He looked in a fair funk when the dreadful thought of having his rat killed came to him. Before the end of that day he spoke to every chap in the class separately, and all but three promised and swore not to lay a finger on the rat. But Freckles, Murdoch, and Morrant wouldn’t swear. Finally he paid Morrant sixpence and so got him over, and Murdoch he let crib off him in “prep.” three times; and Freckles, who was an awfully sportsmanlike chap really, said he was only rotting all the time, and would be the last to do a classy rat like Ferrars’s any harm. In fact, he said he’d much sooner kill Ferrars himself.

Mind you, though, of course, it was simply barbarous for Ferrars to think that his piebald rat could have any effect on his work, yet he proved to me that his success in school and his great popularity with the Doctor dated from the coming of the thing. When he first got it, it was a mere cub-rat, so to say; now, though not a year old, it had turned into as fine a rat as you could wish to meet anywhere. In appearance it had pink eyes and a white head, and a fairish amount of white fur about the body, which got thinner on its stomach, so that you could see the pink skin through to some extent. But the piebaldness of the rat was the great feature. It had two big round patches of fur like the common or garden rat, and one small patch at the nape of its neck; and in addition to this it had one large patch of beautiful yellowish fur, such as you chiefly see on guinea-pigs. Its tail was pink and long, and quite hairless.

Ferrars often kept back good things at meals for it, and the bond between them seemed to grow rummer and rummer, till he let the rat get on his mind, and Wilson said he was getting dotty about it. Which I think was true, for one day, going into the class-room to get a knife from my desk, I saw Ferrars with his rat out, talking to it. He was swatting like anything in play-hours for a special Old Testament history prize, and he had the rat and the Bible and various books of reference all before him. Then, not knowing I was there, he spoke:

“I must win it, ‘Mayne Reid.’ Stick to me this time, old chap, and see me through.”

He called his rat “Mayne Reid” because that was his favorite author.

And “Mayne Reid” seemed to understand, and he turned his pink eyes on to the open Bible and walked over it. Finding he’d walked over the ninth chapter of the Second Book of Kings, Ferrars got excited, and, seeing me, said, “By Jove! then I’ll learn that chapter by heart, though it is so long. It’s good, exciting stuff, anyway, and I bet my rat walking over it means that there’ll be a question about Jehu and Jezebel.”

“You’ll go cracked about that rat,” I said.

“It’s part of my life,” he answered. “I know it seems very peculiar, and so it is, and I don’t suppose such a thing ever happened before, but something tells me my prosperity and success is all bound up in that rat. He’s a familiar spirit, in fact, like Saul had. If he died I should never do much more good, and very likely stick in this class for the rest of my days.”

“You’d better not think like that,” I said, “because rats are short-lived things, owing to the nasty food they eat. Not that ‘Mayne Reid’ has nasty food; but all pink-eyed animals are delicate, and you’ll have to lose him sooner or later.”

Ferrars didn’t take warning by me, but after he really did win the Old Testament prize, and there really was a question about Jezebel, he made a sort of idol out of the rat, and some chaps declared he said his prayers to it. I know he constantly bought it cocoa-nut chips, which it was very fond of. He trained it, too, to live in his breast-pocket, and I often saw him glancing down in class just to get a glimpse of its little eyes looking up at him. That taking the piebald rat into class shows the lengths Ferrars ran. The whole thing was very peculiar. Some chaps said there was a strong likeness growing up between Ferrars and the rat; and certainly his thin, white face had a rattish look sometimes. Other fellows told him his rat was an evil spirit, and would end by doing him a bad turn, but Ferrars turned upon them and jawed them with such frightful language that they never said it again. Meanwhile the Doctor went on taking to Ferrars more and more, and there seemed every chance of his getting the whole Bible by heart before he left Merivale.

Then came the end of the affair like this. Ferrars was so dependent on his rat now that he wouldn’t do a lesson without it, and he lugged it fearlessly into the Doctor’s study at those times, fortunately rare, when the Doctor took our class himself in Scripture. But Ferrars was such a flyer that we all got tarred with the same brush; and the Doctor, after questioning Ferrars for half an hour about Bible people we’d never even heard of, and getting a string of dead-right answers out of him, would dismiss us all in great good temper, forgetting that he’d only been having a go at one chap.

A day came when the Doctor left us for five minutes in the middle of this class, and while most of us had a hurried dip into the plagues of Egypt, which was the business in hand, Ferrars, who knew as much about the plagues as ever Moses did, just got out his rat and gave it a bit of almond and a short breather of a yard or so along the floor. But, the Doctor coming back suddenly, he had only just time to pop it into his pocket, and even then he put the rat into an unusual pocket which it was not accustomed to, and didn’t like, namely, a trouser-pocket. Ferrars also shoved a handkerchief down in the pocket to steady the rat.

Then I saw an awful rum expression come over him, and he grabbed at the pocket and his mouth fell open, and his face got the color of new putty. At the same time I saw his eyes turn to a big bookshelf with glass doors against the side of the room.

“What’s the matter, Ferrars?” said the Doctor. “You appear unwell.”

“Nothing, sir; merely a little passing sickness, I think.”

“Then withdraw, my boy, and ask the matron to give you a few drops of brandy and water. You need not dine to-day,” said the Doctor, very kindly.

But Ferrars wouldn’t withdraw. He knew “Mayne Reid” had got through his pocket and down his trouser-leg; he also knew it was now behind the bookshelf, and might reappear at any moment. So he said he was better, and, actually! that it would be a grief to him to miss one of the Doctor’s own lessons.

But afterwards, when the rat didn’t come out and the class was dismissed, Ferrars was frightful to see. His hair all got on end somehow, and his eyes swelled and stuck out of his head like glass beads, and his cheeks got hollow. He ran awful risks going into the Doctor’s study that day, but the rat wouldn’t come out, and Ferrars looked old enough to be a master when he went to bed, though only eleven and a half really.

“One of two things has happened,” he said to me, for we were in the same dormitory; “either it’s got wedged in behind the bookshelf and will die if not let out, or else there was a rat-hole there, and it went down and has joined common rats, and become a sort of king rat among them.”

“Or been killed,” I said.

“No, they would not kill it,” he answered. “Anyway, to-morrow, after the Doctor’s class is over, and everybody has gone, I shall stop and make a clean breast of it, and ask him, for the sake of humanity, to have the bookshelf moved. But it’s all up with me if the rat has lost its feeling towards me and won’t come back; only if it was stuck and couldn’t come back, that’s different.”

He didn’t sleep much that night, but he said some prayers, which was a thing he didn’t often do; and of course he was praying that the piebald rat might be allowed to return.

But next day, after the Scripture class, in which Ferrars was not nearly so much to the front as usual, and got regularly muddled over a potty question about Jacob, the Doctor saved him the trouble of asking about his rat. He--the Doctor, I mean--had been jolly glum all through class, and when it was ended he did a rum thing, which was awful to see, knowing all we did. He told us to keep our places, then went to the fireplace and picked up the shovel. From the face of it he removed a bit of newspaper, and under the newspaper was “Mayne Reid.” His pink eyes had gone foggy, and there was a little streak of blood on his mouth. Otherwise his body looked all right.

“Now here,” said the Doctor, in an awfully solemn way, “we have a dead, piebald rat. There can be no outlet for error concerning such a rat as this. To have seen such a rat is to remember it. Already three classes have been before me to-day, but nobody knew anything about this animal. That it was a tame rat its fatness and sleekness testify. Moreover, the piebald rat is an outcome of artificiality. A wild rat in a state of nature is brown or black, as the case may be. This rat, then, had an owner, and that owner brought it into my study--_my study!_--and suffered it to escape here. That I do well to be angry you will the more easily understand when I tell you that the unsavory creature was upon my desk last night, and has scratched and even eaten some papers whereon were notes for my next sermon. It was discovered this morning by one of the domestics. She, seeing some object moving upon my desk, struck with the broom-handle, and destroyed this rat. Now let there be no prevarication or evasion of the questions I am going to put to you. First, I wish to know if this rat belongs, or rather belonged, to any among you; and, secondly, I desire to learn whether, supposing the rat be not the property of any present, you happen to know whose property it is, or rather was?”

I stole a look at Ferrars, and he appeared so frightful to see, that for some reason I thought I’d try and help him. So, like a fool, I was just going to speak when young Corkey minimus did. He said:

“Please, sir, it might be a foreign sort of rat that came over in that box of pineapples and things that Ashby major had sent him from the West Indies.”

“When I desire your aid in the elucidation of this problem I will apply for it, Corkey minimus,” answered the Doctor, so Corkey dried up.

Then, in a sort of voice that was strange to us, and seemed to come from his stomach or somewhere new, Ferrars spoke, and I never saw a chap look so ghastly. His eyes were fixed on the rat, and he came forward slowly.

“Please, sir, it was my rat,” he said.

“Yours, Ferrars! _You_ to disobey! You, of all boys, to set my orders at defiance!”

“It wasn’t an ordinary rat, sir.”

“I can see what sort of rat it was, sir, for myself,” thundered the Doctor. “This it is to consider a boy, to devote thought to him, to particularly commend him for his theological knowledge.”

“I don’t take any credit for knowing anything now, sir. It was the rat as much as me.”

“Robert Ferrars!” said the Doctor, in his caning voice, “you are now adding wicked buffoonery to an act in itself sufficiently disreputable!”

“I can’t explain, sir; I don’t mean any buffoonery. That rat was more to me than you’d think. It--it _did_ help me somehow, and now it’s dead it wouldn’t be sportsmanlike to it to say not. And if you’ll let me b-bury it properly, I’ll be very thankful to you.”

The Doctor looked at Ferrars awfully close during this speech.

“Either you are lying,” he said, “or you suffer from some hysterical and neurotic condition, Robert Ferrars, which I have neither suspected nor discovered until this moment.”

Then he told us to go; but Ferrars he kept for half an hour; and when Ferrars came in to dinner I saw he’d been blubbing.

He explained to me after we’d gone to bed. He said:

“No, he didn’t cane me or anything. He just talked, and told me a lot about several things I didn’t know, and said that familiar spirits were specially barred in the Bible. I never thought he’d have even tried to understand me; but he did, and he quite saw my side about the rat. He said kind words over it, too, and was sorry it was dead. And I’ve got to see Doctor Barnes to-morrow too, though, of course, it’s only having my rat on my mind that’s upset me. And he let me have it to b-bury gladly.”

“Where shall you arrange the rat?” I said.

“I’m sending it home in a stays-box that Jane gave me. I’ve written to my sister where to bury it. Jane it was who killed it. She cried like anything when I told her what ‘Mayne Reid’ was to me. But he’s in the book-post by now, beautifully done up in shavings and fresh geranium leaves. It’s no good talking any more. Only I will say that if he was a familiar spirit, he was a jolly good one, very different to the sort barred in the Scriptures. I don’t know how I’ll get on in the exams. now. I wish I was dead, too.”

Then he sniffed a bit, and went to sleep.

Browne, Bradwell, and Me

There’s more stuff torked about fagging at school than anything else in the world, as far as I can see; and being the smalest boy but two at Dunston’s, and a fag myself, I ought to know. Of corse, fags do get it pretty hot sometimes if they happen to fag for a beast, but big fellows aren’t beasts to small ones as a general thing. I’m sure Bradwell was the best chap that ever came to Dunston’s, and when he was expelled over the seege in the Wing Dormatery--him and Trelawny--I felt frightful. I’m Watson minor myself, my brother being Watson major, one of the reserves for the second eleven and captain of the third.

The thing I’m going to write out happened just before the seege, and was all over before that; and it shows what a fag can do. It also shows what a jolly good thing it is for big fellows to treat fags well, and give them odds and ends so as to get their affecksun. If I hadn’t felt what I did to Bradwell, I shouldn’t have run the awful risks I did for him. What I did certinly ruined a great project of Bradwell’s, and upsett him a good bit at the time. But he said afterwards, when the blow had fallen, and when he could look back and think of it without smacking my head, that I had ment well. I remember his very words, for that matter. He said, “Your intenshuns were all right--I will say that--but you’ve ruined my life.” No chap could say farer than that; and, mind you, I did ruin his life in a way. I’ve heard many fellows say Bradwell was a bounder by birth; but he never was to me.

Well, Bradwell had a great admeration for Mabel Dunston, the Doctor’s youngest daughter but one, and she had an equal great admeration for him, for two terms. Bradwell, although a great sportsman in other ways, was fond of girls. If he passed a school of them he would look awfully rum and reddish in the face an’ watery in the eyes. Once, going with him to the playing-field for a football match, he made the distance half a mile longer by going up a side-street to avoid the high-school girls; and I asked him why, and he said it was cheek, but told me all the same. He said, “You can’t meet women got up like this.” Bradwell has frightfully thin calves to his legs when seen in “knickers,” though he is the best goalkeeper that was ever known at Dunston’s. Of course, his affair with Mabel Dunston would never have got to be known by me but for my great use to Bradwell in carrying notes. Being in the Doctor’s house that term I was easily able to do this, and there was a jar of green stuff in the hall where she told me to leave the notes, which I did. She was fifteen, I believe, or else sixteen, but well on in years anyway, and a few months older than Bradwell. It was his general brillance won her, for he could do anything, and his father had plenty of money, being a man like Whitely’s in London, only in the North of England. Bradwell drew almost as well as pictures in books, and he used to illustrate the Latin grammar for his special chums. There’s a part of the Latin grammar called Syntax, which I haven’t come to yet myself, but it has rather rummy things in it, with both the Latin and English of them. And Bradwell used to illustrate these things; and he illustrated two in my grammar out of puer kindness to me. One was, “Balbus is crowning the boy’s head with a garland”; and the other was, “A snake appeared to Sulla while sacrifising”; and you never saw anything better. They were done on the margin in ink, and the snake appearing to Sulla was about the queerest and best thing even seen in a Latin grammar.

I have to tell you this because such a lot happened owing to it.

Now Browne took my class, which is the lowest in the school, and I am seventh in it. And I gradually got to hate Browne, because Bradwell did, and for other reesons of my own to. Browne was said to be only twenty-two, and he looked younger than many of the chaps, his moustashe being whitish and invisibel to the eye. He wore necktyes which I remember hearing Mathers say were an insult to nature, and would have made a rainbow curl up and faint. We always noticed, at arithmetic times, that Browne, if he got a stumper, would put up the lid of his private desk and hide behind it--of course, looking the thing up in his crib. Then he would wander round, as if by accident, to the chap and do the sum off quick while he remembered it. Bradwell always hated him; and when he found that Browne was very friendly with Mabel and Mabel was very friendly with Browne, he hated him far, far wurse.

Bradwell and this girl had a row in the shrubbery at the back of the chapel, and I, being in the gardener’s potting-shed at the time, feeding a cattipiller of mine, heard it. Bradwell said:

“I’m not blind, Mabel, I’ve seen it going on ever since last term. You read his beastly books, and leave rosebuds with scented verbena leaves round them in that stone urn at the gate when he comes down from his house to class.”

And she said:

“And why shouldn’t I? You must remember, please, that I am my own mistress. Besides, the intelligents of a grown-up man is very refreshing.”

For some reason Bradwell didn’t like this. His voice squeaked up into his head in a rather rum way when he answered:

“D’you call _him_ a man? He hasn’t got a muscle on him; and he doesn’t know more than enough to teach the kids.”

“That’s merely mean jellousy,” said Mabel. “Of course, he doesn’t talk to _you_, or show you what is in him. But he tells me all about his secret life, and very butiful it is. He is a jenius, in fact.”

“If it comes to that, what can he do?” said Bradwell, awfully clevverly. “Can he draw?”

“No, he doesn’t draw.”

“Oh! can he sing?”

“No.”

“Can he play the piano?”

“No.”

Now all of these things Bradwell could do to perfecksun, so he got cheerfuller and cheerfuller.

“What _can_ he do, then, besides jaw the kids and always sneak to the Doctor?”

“I never saw such jellousy as this,” said Mabel; “but if you must know I’ll tell you what he can do: he can write poetry out of his own head, and he has got a solid book of it reddy to print some day--there!”

I suppose Bradwell couldn’t write poetry. Anyway, he got very down in the face at this. He didn’t say anything--appeering to be frightfully shocked at what he’d heard. Then Mabel said:

“When you can quote Browning and Byron and Shelley, and write poems yourself, it will be soon enough to sneer at Mr. Browne.”

“You love him,” said Bradwell, in a very tragik voice.

“I don’t love anybody but my own family,” said Mabel; “but I admire him, and I admire his poetry, which is very much out of the common indeed.”

“It’s all over then, I suppose,” said Bradwell.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she replied to him. “A thing that has never begun can’t be all over”; which words of Mabel’s seemed to knock the heart out of Bradwell.

Then the gardener came along, and I didn’t hear anything else. Of corse, I couldn’t _help_ hearing what I had done, though I tried hard not to, and kept feeding my catterpeller like anything all the time.

Two days after I had to carry another note to Mabel, and found one waiting for Bradwell in the usual place; so they must have made it up. Then came the beginning of my misforchunes with Browne. He found the snake appeering to Sulla in my Latin grammar, and called me up and said he knew very well I hadn’t drawn it myself, but wanted to know who had. He said it was wrong to the Doctor to ruin our books, and that he had seen in several different books the same snake, evidently done by the same boy, owing to them being so much similar.

But the very identical thing had happened in another class--to Steggles, Bradwell having drawn him the same picture; and knowing what Steggles said, being a chap who is frightfully cunning, I said the same now to Browne. I said I left the book on my desk, and somebody came along and done it while I was out of the room. Browne seemed inclined not to believe this. Anyway, he took the Latin grammar away with him. But I heard no more about it till the next evening, when I wanted the book in prep. Remembering Browne had it, I went off to his study and knocked and walked in.

Browne wasn’t there for the moment, and the room was empty. I took the opportunity to look at a rather butiful tobacco-jar of Browne’s which I have seen at a distance on his mantlepiece many times. Passing his table to get to it, I chanced to glance there, and juge of my surprise when the first words I saw at the top of a big sheet of paper were, "To Mabel"! Underneeth was a lot of writing, and the whole table seemed to be littered with paper covered with small bits of separate writing, much of it scratched out and done over again. But the piece with “To Mabel” at the top was all butiful and clean, without anything scratched, being, I suppose, the result of all the other bits put together and neetly copied out.

Well, there I was with my duty towards Bradwell as his fag. Browne had evidently done a verse out of his own head for Mabel Dunston, and had written it in this butiful style, on thick white paper, to send to her. I felt if she got it, knowing what she’d said to Bradwell about Browne, that it was certin she would abbandon Bradwell, him not being any good at poems. I wouldn’t have done it for anybody else in the world _but_ Bradwell; I wouldn’t have done it at all if I had known what the end of it was going to be; but, anyway, at the time it seemed to me, as Bradwell s fag, I ought to do it; so I did.

I took the poem and rolled it up so as not to hurt it, and hooked off to Bradwell. He was in his study, and Trelawny, who shares it with him, being out of the room, I was able to explain. I said:

“If you please, Bradwell, I’ve come from Mr. Browne’s study, and he was not there, and happening by a curious axcident to glance on the table I saw this. Knowing about you and Mabel, and being your fag, I took it.”

“Took what?” said Bradwell.

I put the thing in front of him, and he got red and excited.

“It’s a poem to Mabel by that beast Browne,” he said.

Then he read it out, half to himself, but I heard. The thing ran like this:

"TO MABEL

“Oh let my Muse sing to the name of Mabel,
Whose azure eyes are fastened to my soul,
Like to forget-me-nots in button-hole.
To tell of my heart’s torment I’m unable.
My thoughts they spin; my brain it grows unstable
When fixed on Thee. Perchance it is my rôle
Never to reach my mad ambition’s Goal,
But to live ever ’midst scholastic babel.
Thy glances brighten all my lonely lot.
Prometheus-like a vulture gnaws my heart,
In biting blasts and under sunshine hot.
My dreams are shattered by a barbed dart,
And, waking wild, I scream that I may not
Whisper the oaths I yearn to Thee impart.”

I told Bradwell I didn’t quite understand it, and he sat on me.

“You wouldn’t,” he said, “a kid like you. But I do. It’s a sonnit, and an extramly fine one. I _hate_ the chap, but it’s no good pretending he’s not a poet, because this jolly well proves he is. Look at the rimes and the smoothness!”

It seemed a heroik thing of Bradwell to say that, feeling as he did to Browne. He thought for a bit, but told me not to go.

“Of corse,” he said, “this must be returned. All’s fair in--in a case of this kind, but--”

Then he thought very deeply and read the sonnit again. Suddenly he took a bit of paper and copied down Browne’s poem word for word. Then he told me to cut back like lightning to Browne’s study, and to put the poem back on his desk if I could--if not, to most carefully keep it till the first chance of getting it back to Browne’s room without being spotted.

“You’re a splendid fag,” he said, “and I shan’t forget this. It’s the sort of thing that squires did for their knights in olden times; and they got good rewards too. Now hook it.”

It’s worth a lot, mind you, to get praise like that from such a chap as Bradwell.

When I got back, Browne was rumaging over his table and sweering a good deal in a loud wisper. He told me to wait a minute, and went off to look in his bedroom. Then I seezed my opportunity, and slipped the sonnit on his table under some papers. When he came back he was worried, and went on hunting till he found it. Then he said “Ah!” to himself, and got pleasanter and asked me what I wanted. I told him my Latin grammar, and, being in a very happy state now, owing to finding the poem, he gave my book back and told me to clear out; which I did.

After prep. I met Bradwell going in to prayers, and he handed me a note for Mabel to put in the usual place. He looked awfully rum when he gave it to me, and he saw that I saw he looked rum. So he said:

“I don’t mind letting you know, owing to your being such a good fag and my trusting you as I do. You may read the letter in prayers, then seal it down and put it behind the pot of ferns in the hall in the usual place.”

Of corse, it wasn’t really a letter, or Bradwell wouldn’t have let me read it. It was just Browne’s sonnit coppied out by Bradwell word for word; and at the bottom where the words, “What about poetry now?--A. T. B.” A. T. B. are Bradwell’s initials, his full name being Arthur Thomas Bradwell. You see, he didn’t exsaxtly say he’d _written_ the sonnit. He only said, “What about poetry now?”

The excitement of it all kept me awake for hours and hours through the night. I don’t suppose any fag ever did more for a big fellow than I had done for Bradwell that day. Then I began to wonder when Browne would send off his poem, and wether Mabel would get them both together or one at a time. You see, of corse, Browne would send her the thing as original, and there was nothing in Bradwell’s letter to exsaxtly say he hadn’t written it; and puzzling the thing out for hours and hours, I at last came to the conklusion that she would find it very difficult which to believe, because how could she know which was telling the truth to her? Then, about three or four in the morning almost, I began to feel rather terrible over it, because I thought of what frightful trouble Browne must have had to write the sonnit. He might have taken terms and terms over it for all I could tell, not, of corse, knowing myself how long it took to write poetry. I felt rather sorry for Browne; but after all a chap’s duty is to the fellow he fags for before masters; and feeling that, I went to sleep.

Three days later Bradwell had me in his room and told me the end of it all, which shows that a girl never does what you might exspect.

“As a lesson to you, young Watson,” said Bradwell, “I may tell you that my career has been utterly blighted and my life ruined by that business of the sonnit.”

I said I was sorry to hear it.

He said:

“Yes, blighted; and so’s his--I mean Browne’s. She got my letter that night and his next morning. That night she felt all her old feeling for me return because of the sonnit, thinking I’d done it. Then, next morning, she got just the very same stuff to a word from Browne, with a letter saying he had burned the midnight oil to compose it. Well, there you are. What does she do? Insted of accepting my statement, being the first, she argues in a most elaborate way that I couldn’t possibly have coppied from Browne, and Browne couldn’t possibly have copied from me. But it would have been to much of a coinsidence if we’d both written exsaxtly the same sonnit out of our own heads, so what does she conklude?”

I said I didn’t know.

“Why, fathead, that we both coppied it from somebody else--out of some book by some well-known proper dead poet. I’ve no doubt now, on thinking over it, that Browne _did_ do that; because when I first read his poem I could hardly believe that he had written such real poetry, owing to the rimes and smoothness. But it’s all over now. She’s written a letter I can’t show you. To hope even for her friendship wouldn’t be any good. A girl hates a joke something frightful.”

“How about Browne?” I said.

“She’s written to him also, asking him where he got the verses out of, and exsplaining she doesn’t believe they are original, and saying how another acquaintance of hers had sent the very same lot the day before. So now you see what a sinful mess you’ve made of it.”

I said I did, but I felt it was my duty to him.

“Yes, I know,” he said; “but the question is, What do I do now? You see ‘all’s fair’ and all that; but now, being out of the hunt, ought I to throw up the sponge and tell the truth, or ought I not?”

“I don’t know, Bradwell,” I said; “but anyway you won’t mention me, I hope, because I only acted for you, and did a jolly dangerous thing.”

“No, you’re safe enough, and, in fact, I’m going to reward you for what you _did_ do,” said Bradwell. “But seeing I’m out of it, I think it will be a manly act to Browne if I tell Mabel frankly that I resorted to strateji.”

“But me?” I said.

“I shall merely inform her,” answered Bradwell, “that one of my emissaceries found the poem, and, of course, brought it to me; that I despatched it--as a joke, taking care not to say I was the auther. I shall end with these words: ‘Browne is innosent.’”