Читать книгу The Human Boy - Eden Phillpotts - Страница 10

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There is not much more to be said about the protest of the Wing Dormitory. I suppose Thompson was better up in tactics really than Trelawny. Anyway, he found a weak spot that Trelawny never thought of, and he ended the siege by half-past seven the following morning.

About six Ashby major, whose watch it was, reported that the school fire-escape was coming round the corner. With it appeared Mr. Thompson, Mr. Mannering, who is an Oxford “Blue” and not much smaller than Mr. Thompson, the Doctor, the gardener, and the military agent who drills our volunteer corps and teaches gymnastics. They put the escape against the wall of the Wing Dormitory, between two windows, where it couldn’t be reached by us. Then Thompson and Mannering went up, and the sergeant and gardener followed. The Doctor waited at the foot of the ladder.

“They’ll get through the roof!” said Trelawny; “I never thought of that!”

Trelawny turned awfully rum in the face, and tried to think out a way of repelling a roof attack; but there wasn’t time. In about ten minutes or so the end of an iron bar came through the ceiling; then followed a regular avalanche of plaster and dust, that fell on Watson minor and jolly nearly smothered him. Then came Thompson, Mannering followed, and the gardener and the sergeant dropped after them as quick as lightning. Of course, we were done, because only half of us were fighters, the rest being kids; and Trelawny himself being just fifteen and Bradwell fourteen and Ashby major twelve and a half, and I only eleven and a half, it was no good.

“We surrender,” said Trelawny.

“Surrender, you little brute, I should think you did yield!” said Mannering, who had cut his hand getting the slates off the roof, and was in a rare bate.

“You needn’t insult a defeated force, sir,” said Trelawny, keeping his nerve jolly well. “We are prepared to pay the penalty of failure, and having meant well we--we don’t care.”

But whether we meant well or not, I know Trelawney and Bradwell both got expelled, though Thompson was said to have tried very hard for them. Dunston didn’t seem to realize what frightfully good motives prompted them to protest against Thompson in an abstract way. Nothing was done to anybody else except Ashby major and me and Wilson. We were flogged by Mr. Mannering for the Doctor; and he did it as you might expect from a “Blue.”

As for Thompson, he stayed on, and the protest never got into print; and there wasn’t much disgrace for Trelawny or Bradwell after all, because the first afterwards got into Woolwich ten from the top, through an army crammer’s, and the second joined his father, who was the Whiteley of the North I spoke of. He wrote to me only a week ago to say that he was getting a hundred pounds a year from his governor for doing much less than he had to do at Dunston’s. Mind you, Thompson is a jolly good sort, really, and we know it now; and, as I heard my uncle say of somebody else, I don’t suppose it’s a matter of life and death whether or no a chap puts his h’s in the wrong places if his heart’s in the right one.